Part of that issue involves costs and contracts. I work with many of our gov't systems and they're still on Vista. This has to due with their ELA (enterprise license agreement) which is contracted to a certain month/day/year.

A lot of companies to include the gov't (this includes the military) involve people who are not qualified IT professionals, engineers and administrators that are making these decisions. In any large-scale managed system where productivity is vital, it's important to make a solid assessment of productivity improvements before deploying changes and upgrades throughout the entire system.

When I coordinated training for our corporate clients, it wasn't that big of a deal, the key training involved mostly those on the support team than the end users.

For the typical end user:

• Win2k and XP was minor, other than some cosmetic changes the users had no issue learning XP quickly.
  
• XP to Vista was more involved, menu system changed and a simple 1 hour classroom instruction solved that nicely.
  
• Vista to 7 isn't even worth mentioning, Vista users will have almost no issue using 7

.


For the IT security and management team, the key part was updating your MCSE's. Again 2000 and XP wasn't that different, Vista was a big change, 7 added more but involved a lot more streamlining which addressed many of the headaches that involved Vista administration.

You might think that but my experience shows different. Most users spend over 90% of the time learning the new menu system. In 1 hour, you can take care of over 75% of their concerns. The other 25% is about allowing them to simply interact and try the new OS themselves.

There's 2 areas of focus, the first is the end user portion which is the easy part, done it for over 500,000 clients, many of them not what you would consider computer-savvy. They were able to learn XP to 7 without much issue, most of the concerns I had to address was the new Control Panel icons, Personalization and new features unique to 7 (like how to put 2 windows side-by-side on the same monitor by using WIN + LEFT/RIGHT arrow hotkeys, etc.) As far as using IE/Firefox, the icons looks pretty much the same as before, using Outlook (on Exchange) is no different, they use the same apps as they did before (Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc.).

Then there's the guys who support all the users, this is the big challenge. You can't simply print out a document and expect know all of the changes from XP to 7 in a timely manner. It's much more time-efficient to send a few of your staff to class and get them updated on the new changes, then send them to update their certs. End users don't need to know the changes made to the network stacks in Windows 7 from XP, but the support team does.

Businesses stay on XP for their own unique reasons, cost versus need to upgrade. Not all machines currently running XP will be able to take advantage of Windows7 without replacing their current with new computers. I don't expect a shop selling comic books and baseball cards to rush out to change out their XP system to 7 for example... but a bank, school institution, city and county/state systems on the other hand...

I hope that clarifies a few things.

pparks1 said:

Remember that a lot of businesses stuck with XP. The training is going from XP to Windows 7....that will take a bit of effort.

For end users the move from XP to Windows 7 will be nowhere near as difficult as XP to Vista would have been. Win7 is so much more usable and stable than Vista.

The private uptake of Win 7 is huge and a good number of users will already have a PC at home running Windows 7 so it won't be particlularly daunting for them.
:)

Stratos said:

You might think that but my experience shows different. Most users spend over 90% of the time learning the new menu system. In 1 hour, you can take care of over 75% of their concerns. The other 25% is about allowing them to simply interact and try the new OS themselves.

There's 2 areas of focus, the first is the end user portion which is the easy part, done it for over 500,000 clients, many of them not what you would consider computer-savvy. They were able to learn XP to 7 without much issue, most of the concerns I had to address was the new Control Panel icons, Personalization and new features unique to 7 (like how to put 2 windows side-by-side on the same monitor by using WIN + LEFT/RIGHT arrow hotkeys, etc.) As far as using IE/Firefox, the icons looks pretty much the same as before, using Outlook (on Exchange) is no different, they use the same apps as they did before (Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc.).

Then there's the guys who support all the users, this is the big challenge. You can't simply print out a document and expect know all of the changes from XP to 7 in a timely manner. It's much more time-efficient to send a few of your staff to class and get them updated on the new changes, then send them to update their certs. End users don't need to know the changes made to the network stacks in Windows 7 from XP, but the support team does.

Businesses stay on XP for their own unique reasons, cost versus need to upgrade. Not all machines currently running XP will be able to take advantage of Windows7 without replacing their current with new computers. I don't expect a shop selling comic books and baseball cards to rush out to change out their XP system to 7 for example... but a bank, school institution, city and county/state systems on the other hand...

I hope that clarifies a few things.

Hi there
often there are SERIOUS reasons to stay with XP -- not so much for WINDOWS but some of the Back Office / Database systems that need to be accessed by Corporate users STILL need a Windows XP GUI.

For example some SAP (HUGE HUGE Software company) systems still need an XP front end.

It's often THESE types of applications that make the reason that a company delays upgrading the OS to W7.

Incidentally now a lot of companies are going down the road of allowing their OWN users to use their OWN computers on company networks.

Once the security issues can be handled this is not a bad idea -- people these days will tend to have much more up to date computers than a typical company has for all sorts of reasons. It's cheaper too as the employee buys his own computer - possibly with sole sort of subsidy from the company.

The main difficulty is in security and control but IF ( a big IF) this can be managed its very popular and will be cheaper for the company in the long run.

Cheers
jimbo