Upgrade time looms
At the beginning of December, Vista and the new version of Microsoft Office – Office 2007 – were released to the business community. However, Microsoft is only going to let the man in the street get his hand on its shiny new operating system on 30 January next year.
For some it won’t be nearly soon enough; but for those who don’t spend their lives on the jagged edge of technology, it may be a question of "Why do we need a new version of Windows?"
Sadly there is no short answer to this question. While many people will be able to soldier on using Windows XP, which is still a solid and reliable operating system, many of the new features that Microsoft has built into Vista will make the overall experience of using a computer a better one.
Cyril Belikoff, information worker business group executive at Microsoft SA, says that a key driver in the development of Vista, Office and other parts of the Office system (including the new Exchange Server 2007 mail/collaboration system) was tooling up its offerings for what it terms "the new world of work" – where people tend to be more mobile and collaborate more intensively than ever before. That’s less true for Vista than for Office 2007, but with the way consumers interact with technology changing, the technology needs to keep up.
Belikoff says that while previous generations of office workers would communicate via letters and this generation lives and dies by email, the next generation – currently at either high school or university – is already abandoning email for instant messaging and when they enter the workforce they’ll carry that preference with them.
Belikoff says that while the new version of Office has a completely new look and feel, the system has to cater for users who already feel completely at home with technology plus those who still regard technology as a necessary evil.
Over coming months we’re likely to be deluged with a mass of information concerning the new versions of Office and Windows. However, there are a few key areas where both systems will make your PC look and feel entirely new.
Vista has a shiny new coat of paint, a dark grey – officially called "slate" – colour scheme. But if you’re running an older machine, it may not look quite as pretty, as the system scales its effects depending on how well endowed your PC is.
There’s also a new version of Outlook Express, now called Windows Mail, and there is finally a built-in calendaring application.
What’s going to make the biggest difference to users’ lives is the system search functionality. Instead of the old fashioned search, where you had time to make a cup of coffee while Windows searched through every file on your system to find the one titled kids.jpg, Vista indexes all the content on your drive, including emails and documents, and then searches the index rather than searching the entire hard drive. The equivalent of looking through an index of books at a library rather than having to search every shelf.
Those who have had a chance to use Google Desktop or MSN Desktop Search, or who have played around on the latest version of Mac OS X, will understand how well this search functionality works. Suffice to say it will change the away PC users locate any kind of information and makes searching through folders a thing of the past.
Vista is also intended to be significantly more secure than any previous version of Windows. When using it you’ll be asked on a regular basis if you want to do something, similar to those "empty recycle bin" messages you now receive. The risk that Microsoft has taken with this added level of security is that many users will simply click the OK button without reading the message, allowing malicious software free rein on their PCs.
If these additional layers of security are enough to bar pests remains to be seen, but with the level of viruses and spyware currently plaguing Windows XP we can only hope that Microsoft has got it right this time.
What’s clear is that we won’t have to wait another five years for new functionality to be added to Windows – a number of features dropped from Vista due to time constraints will be released in the next year or so. What’s of more concern to Microsoft is the massive move towards Internet applications offering some of the functionality of Microsoft Office.
Google already offers an online word processor and spreadsheet, and while its functionality is a pale imitation of Excel or Word for people with broadband connections and limited requirements, the need for a full version of Word and its associated costs isn’t a necessity.
While choosing a version of Office shouldn’t be difficult, picking one of the versions of Vista that Microsoft will offer could be trickier. Gone is Windows XP Home and Professional and in its place consumers will find Vista Starter edition, Home Basic, Home Premium, Vista Business edition, Enterprise edition and – the big daddy of them all – Vista Ultimate Edition.
While the Starter edition won’t be available to most users, it’s likely that many entry-level systems will ship with Vista Home Basic, with the higher end systems opting for Vista Home Premium. The bright side of the proliferation of versions is that it’s possible to upgrade from one version to another simply by entering the correct product code, as the DVDs the operating system will ship will be identical, allowing almost instantaneous upgrades over the web.
Finweek
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