Ready for Vista after a compatibility delay
As a member of Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program, Gary Wilhelm has been ready for Vista for nearly two years. But only now is he ready to start his Vista rollout at the Englewood Hospital Medical Center in New Jersey, in concert with a hardware refresh. The issue was compatibility: the Encentuate single-sign-on software that the hospital uses was only recently updated to support Vista and is now being tested, notes Wilhelm, the hospital's business and systems financial manager (a combination of CTO and CFO).
Wilhelm's Vista plans were based primarily on a desire to modernize the hospital's systems. Right now, in addition to the bulk of XP installations, there are still Windows 2000, 98, 95, and even 3.1 systems in use. The pre-XP systems will be the first to be replaced with Vista PCs. "Managing two OSes [XP and Vista] will be easier," he says dryly.
But the Vista migration will also bring automatic connection to wireless LANs, without requiring users to reauthenticate as they switch access points -- "a pleasant surprise that XP can't do," Wilhelm says. He also likes the new user interface, which he says he quickly learned to prefer over XP's: "It's like watching high-def and trying to go back."
Wilhelm began buying Vista-compatible PCs a year ago, but he installed XP on them pending the resolution to the SSO issue and to an unrelated VPN compatibility issue. (Wilhelm resolved than VPN issue in the five months that Vista was available to businesses but not to consumers, so Vista-equipped hospital users working from home never encountered the compatibility issue.)
He won't upgrade those PCs to Vista ("I didn't want to spend the time," he says) but he plans on bringing Vista into the hospital with the next department scheduled for a hardware refresh -- the 100 or so nursing floor computers will all run Vista later this year, he notes. Because Wilhelm refreshes the hospital's PCs in three-year cycles, he expects to have replaced all 2,500 systems with Vista by 2011.
The SSO and VPN compatibility issues were all that stood in the way of an earlier Vista deployment, Wilhelm says. The issues that some users have had with the new security model didn't apply to a medical setting because his IT group had already locked down the PCs in a way similar to what Vista does by default. "We never gave users full access to the PC [administrator privileges], so they're not seeing a change" in what applications they can run from user mode, he notes.
One Vista security feature has caused some problems, Wilhelm notes: the BitLocker encryption capability. It is an all-or-nothing tool, encrypting the entire disk or nothing, which caused some access issues on PCs that are used by multiple people with separate user accounts. It also would encrypt only the C drive, even though the hospital uses a separate D partition for data, distinct from application and system files. Wilhelm hopes that Microsoft will change BitLocker so it can encrypt just specific files or folders, as some third-party encryption tools already do, and support encryption across multiple volumes.
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