Gartner is recommending that enterprises not deeply into a Vista roll-out should wait for Windows 7. It’s no secret that a majority of companies surveyed are keeping XP rather than deploy Windows Vista to the desktop. Common complaints include performance, driver, and application compatibility problems, though these latter two have been greatly reduced over time. It is nice to have a homogeneous desktop environment, but it will probably be less expensive and problematic to keep XP on older systems and rollout the new OS on new hardware.
Personally I would prefer to stick with XP until the bitter end, but we will begin to see increased support overhead after mainstream support ends. My main concern is the “Non-security hotfix support” which will require a special agreement with Microsoft. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy.
It makes sense start putting together a roadmap to transition
- full environment software and hardware inventory
- determine possible hardware problems
- Printers, scanners, business-card readers, etc.
- Determine software problems
- Compatibility of standard software
- What about non-standard, business critical applications?
- set up training or at least some simple documentation like cheat-sheets