Since the beginning of this month when an official Windows 7 upgrade chart become available, there has been much criticism online of how restrictive the in-place options are, and how complex the chart is - Ed Bott and Nilay Patel are two such examples. In fact Ed from ZDNet has put together a much simpler version of the chart with slightly less custom install boxes showing, but I can’t get overly exited about the original – it clearly helps someone with version X of Windows get to their desired version of Windows 7 without too much digging through the wealth of information.

Nilay says that “if you're still on XP or you're trying to do anything out of the ordinary you'd better get ready for some pain”. I disagree. Let’s think about the scenarios here for a moment.

According to current statistics, 73% of computers are running Windows XP, with 18% running Windows Vista. On the face of it that is bad news for anyone looking for a painless upgrade, but I suspect that the reality is slightly different.

- a significant proportion of those XP computers will be corporate and no corporate IT department is going to realistically look at upgrading on a machine by machine basis – they will utilise whatever deployment tools they have for mass imaging so the fact that the machine was running XP is immaterial.

- a large number of consumers with Windows XP are quite happy – I know, I talk to them - they just bought a computer to get online / word process / whatever and are not bothered about the latest and greatest. Sometimes we technophiles lose sight of actual reality with our ever present desire to upgrade. Their upgrade will come when the computer dies and they buy a new one.

- lastly we are left with those that bought a machine with Vista, downgraded and are now wondering about how to get to Windows 7 without the pain.

Painless upgrade

Being a TechNet Plus subscriber I have of course downloaded and installed Windows 7 and upgrading from XP on a test computer took around 10 minutes of my time. No need to wipe the drives and start from fresh, just grab a Windows Vista Anytime Upgrade DVD and upgrade to a version of Vista (I recommend installing the most limited version you can get away with) without the need for a licence key.

This won’t be a quick process, but at the same time you won’t have to be present for most of the time.

Once XP has upgraded to Vista, repeat the process with the Windows 7 DVD and et voilà – XP upgraded to Windows 7 complete with all compatible applications and your personal settings. Not really a painful process.

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Having received my Technical Preview invitation for Office 2010, I decided to download and install this morning. Upgrade process was smooth and the only slight snag was that I was at home, and Outlook 2010 really wanted to be connected to the Exchange server before letting me back at my cached mailbox – our school setup doesn’t allow remote connections using the full Outlook client so I had to wait until I got into work before being able to get back into my mailbox.

This post is really just about Outlook as it is really my workhorse application of the suite – I find other options such as OpenOffice.org are of equal usability but nothing quite replaces Outlook – not even Evolution.

Quick Steps

One of the first things that struck me was the Quick Steps facility. Click on Team E-Mail and a lookup is made to see who my subordinates are as listed in Active Directory. Made some changes to these and found that they were replicated real time. Ditto for the To Manager option – highlight an e-mail, click To Manager and that e-mail will be forwarded to your line manager as recorded in Active Directory.

RSS Feeds

RSS Feed functionality continues to be present and as I use Outlook as my main RSS feed reader, I was pleased to see that feeds have been moved to the bottom of the folder list rather than being sandwiched in the middle of my main mailbox folders.

Conversations

The addition of Show Messages from All Folders is welcome when it comes to viewing messages by conversation. Adding Sent Items in makes it much easier to keep track of specific conversations, with the Clean Up Conversation option there to remove those extra messages that don’t really need to be around any more. The only snag I see with threading by conversation and adding in all folders is that the reference seems to be subject line – not good when business colleagues use “Sprowston High School” as the subject line.

I will try and get around to looking at the other parts of the suite later on and maybe write something about them as well, but for the time being I am impressed with Outlook 2010 and even the ribbon a.k.a. Fluent User Interface (new to Outlook) seems to have mellowed since Office 2007.

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Yesterday was the first Open Source Schools Unconference at the NCSL in Nottingham. A very interesting day with lots of great discussions and networking, two very thought provoking keynote presentations (Graham Attwell and George Auckland) and breakout sessions covering a wide subject spectrum.

For those who are interested my slides are available to download from SlideShare (see below) and I have also made a backup of the conference tweets available to download.

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I have been thinking a lot recently about open source software (FOSS), and in particular the merits of adoption in schools. This seems to be a subject which leads to polarised debates – usually presented as being either for or against open source with nothing in-between.

Arguments against open source are in many cases presented by colleagues as “there is no company to turn to for fixes”, but at the same time those people are happy to run outdated versions of commericial software that now lack support. The development process for most popular open source is such that bug fixes and security updates are provided quickly.

Of course it is rarely as clear cut as for or against and we invariably work in a mixed economy with LAMP servers sitting in the background doing all of the work for web and other infrastructure functions with Microsoft products on the desktop.

My own background is one of commercial IT with a host of Microsoft and Apple certifications and therefore would be seen as a traditional proprietary supporter, but at the same time a big fan of Ubuntu and the way that it and other Linux distributions have made the whole notion of a turn key open source distribution a reality.

Topic for discussion

In order to try and reach a consensus within the education sector, I have proposed a session at the Open Source Schools Unconference 09 at the NCSL on July 20th. Full details about the session can be found here, but in essence I intend to address the following key questions;

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Recently I wrote about having some Microsoft exam vouchers available for free. Short notice I know, but no takers in good time. Their loss, my gain I suppose. Just as time was about to run out for the vouchers, I saw this post from Matt McSpirit detailing some free Hyper-V training so decided to embark upon studying for exam 70-652 TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring with a day or so to go.

Normally my preparation routine for any form of technical certification exam is to use the product for a while (a must – there really is no shortcut for experience), possibly buy and read the official training kit, and then use the MeasureUp material to assess my knowledge in the areas covered by the exam.

Although Hyper-V is a product I have used for the last year or so it has not been high on my familiarisation radar but I found that the free eLearning offer was very comprehensive and covered all of the exam topic areas, and coupled with ‘on the job’ knowledge enabled me to pass the exam with a good score. I really would recommend this eLearning to anyone with a day or so to spare and who wishes to proceed down the Microsoft virtualisation route.

For those that prefer a book, Ken Jones has just written about the new MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit. Topics covered seem broadly in line with the eLearning – but the book isn’t free!

Ken also cites a recent IDC study that concludes that worldwide spending on virtualisation is expect to reach $15 billion worldwide in 2009 – this seems like a very good reason to get certified with Hyper-V and demonstrate skills in a growth area.

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Where has all the time gone? Last time I looked it was May, but now it is mid June and my diary is looking pretty full! The problem with this is that I have no opportunities to redeem some Microsoft exam vouchers that I have. They are to be used at any Prometric test centre and cover 100% of the exam cost - the catch is that the exams must be taken by June 30th.

So if you have been putting off taking an exam and fancy a free shot at it, then send me a direct message via Twitter (jameswwright) and I will distribute them on a first come, first served basis.

Updated 21st June

Despite having had a good number of hits for this post, I didn’t get one bite for the free exams. In the end that turned out well for me as I thought “what the hell” and went to London yesterday to sit, and pass, exams 70-351 and 70-631.

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The announced Windows 7 release date probably comes as no surprise to those who have used original beta and subsequent release candidate, nor those who understand the importance of the Thanksgiving holiday season in the United States and the significant retail opportunities it brings…

I have been using Windows 7 as my primary OS for a while now and I have been really impressed with it both from a stability and compatibility perspective (anti-virus needed a new version but everything else has been fine so far), but also because of the speedy feel of day to day operations.

Although not comparing like for like, the Windows Vista compatible Dell D430 that I use (Q3 2007) is on a par with my old workhorse ‘Designed for Windows XP’ Dell D600 (Q1 2005) when it comes to the feel of day to day Windows 7 use.

As well as being an active Microsoft user, I also spend quite a lot of time running Ubuntu and am very interested in exploring the interoperability issues with switching between platforms and the use of open source in education. One of the popular reasons for using Linux based operating systems over XP/Vista is the lower hardware footprint. Although I don’t have any hard facts to back this up, my anecdotal view from using the Dell D600 is that Ubuntu 9.04 running OpenOffice.org and Evolution is markedly slower than Windows 7 with Office 2007 Enterprise – slowness feels video based so possibly due to X Org ATI driver implementation?

Unashamedly borrowing from Ray Fleming, I have included a table highlighting the basic specs of the machines I have used so far with Windows 7.

Hopefully TechNet Plus subscribers will be able to get their hands on the release prior to October 22nd.

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