Windows 7 Rollout time frame

BrainwardBrainward Member Posts: 11 ■□□□□□□□□□
Hi,

A friend of mine is working in a large company (1000 + users) they are looking to rollout W7 in the next few weeks. Their timeframe is set for about 2 months. They are currently on W2k. It is an external company doing the rollout. I have heard that normally this can take up to at least 6 months for testing of in house apps aswell as everything else. He said there are about 60 apps used day to day, at least 15 of these are inhouse apps. I am just wondering what kind of time frame he should be expecting for the job to be finished?

The timeframe seems a little optamistic to me!

Thanks

Comments

  • WilliamK99WilliamK99 Member Posts: 278
    Not very often a large company rolls out the newest Windows OS near it's release date. They need at least a few months to ensure all the software they are using is fully compatible with Win 7.....

    Glad I am not in the IT Department in that company....
  • BrainwardBrainward Member Posts: 11 ■□□□□□□□□□
    Thats what I was thinking. Vista is a prime example of what can go wrong.
  • WilliamK99WilliamK99 Member Posts: 278
    Not even Vista, if a company is using in house software, you want to fully test it against the full release of the OS, not the Beta that has been out for the past 6 to 9 months.

    In the military, we wait at least 2 years while those higher, test it, run security tests, and generally work out the kinks before they start deploying it to everyone.

    In fact, the Army is just finishing up migrating to Vista this year..... I do not envy anyone who is told to upgrade to a new OS without being given proper time to migrate, you are only going to run into problems and ultimately, the blame will be on the IT guys, not the ones who made the decision to migrate.
  • ClaymooreClaymoore Member Posts: 1,637
    2 months is very aggressive and your 6 month guess is more realistic. If the external company has the tools and the expertise, making the applications work with Win7 isn't as challenging as you might think.
  • BrainwardBrainward Member Posts: 11 ■□□□□□□□□□
    How about inhouse apps that are only working on Access 97?? :)
  • blargoeblargoe Member Posts: 4,174 ■■■■■■■■■□
    My company used to regularly push out the bleeding edge technology. IT cutbacks and staff reductions tend to squash those ways of thinking.
    IT guy since 12/00

    Recent: 11/2019 - RHCSA (RHEL 7); 2/2019 - Updated VCP to 6.5 (just a few days before VMware discontinued the re-cert policy...)
    Working on: RHCE/Ansible
    Future: Probably continued Red Hat Immersion, Possibly VCAP Design, or maybe a completely different path. Depends on job demands...
  • Solaris_UNIXSolaris_UNIX Member Posts: 93 ■■□□□□□□□□
    It seems like it would be a lot easier to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 than it would be to upgrade from XP / Win2k3 to Windows 7 because AFAIK both "Windows Vista" and "Windows 7" use the same DDI (Device Driver Interface) and ABI (Application Binary Interface), so if something works on Vista, I would suspect that it would probably work in almost the same way on Windows 7 (although I have yet to subject this theory to real empirical tests in a lab).

    One big complaint I've had for a long time now against Linux (as someone who sysadmins Linux servers for a living) is that Linus and friends have a history of changing the DDI and ABI of Linux in ways that can cause "out of main kernel tree" device drivers and software to break in sometimes unpredictable ways. I've been starting to lean more towards *BSD and Solaris as of late because I like the security features (jails, zones, PF, etc.) and the DDI and ABI seems relatively stable and doesn't seem to change quite as frequently as the Linux one does. My other big complaint with Linux has been the ubiquitous lack of standardization between the thousands of different Linux distros (i.e. the Red Hat way is different than the Debian way which is different than the Gentoo way which is different than the Suse way, etc. yet my boss expects me to be able to support them all equally since they're all "Linux"... lol).

    Kudos to Microsoft though for finally picking a DDI (the Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 one) and sticking with it for multiple releases. Having less broken stuff between releases will mean less work for under-staffed IT departments, some of which are already over-burdened with too much work to do as it is anyway. Hopefully they can keep the ABI and DDI the same for "Windows 8" whenever that one comes out as well.

    If you're an IT guy and you don't like having your stuff break in between major releases then lobby Microsoft (and their programmers) and tell them that you feel that they should try to keep a stable ABI and DDI that persists throughout future releases. :)


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