Welcome to my Vista Blog

As I mention in the header, I have spent this year working on the implementation of Vista for a large organization. We had the Microsoft consultants in giving Vista presentations during the weeks leading up to the official Vista launch. We had teams dedicated to product engineering the minute the official copies landed in our hot little hands. We have leveraged our premier Microsoft support and kept our co-located Microsoft consultant busy with our questions and complaints.

During this process I have seriously felt the bleeding edge. I have spent countless hours researching solutions by piecing together hints and fragments found under widely scattered rocks. I have come to realize that it is time for me to give back to the web and to put more of the stuff in my head on paper before I forget it all.

I have seriously gotten in-depth with a few aspects of Vista. The details of which could drown this page in text. In an attempt to compartmentalize, I will be writing a series of articles where a number of them may relate to one technology, but each article will be narrowly focused on one specific aspect of that technology. I hope this format works. I am hoping that these articles will give you a more complete picture of a technology and maybe tie together some of the fragments you have found elsewhere. Now, I'm not getting paid for this and I don't have oodles of time to give to this effort, but I will do my best to be complete and I will update these posts as people
point out the flaws.

At the risk of ruining the punchline at the end of this series of articles, I would like to warn you of my bias. I am no longer a fan of Vista. I have spent a lot of time getting to know this product. It is pretty. It has some nice features. But it is not ready to be used. There are a couple of impressions that I am often left with when looking at this product. It seems like it was rushed out the door. (Plenty of features were developed but they don't seem to have been developed to full maturity.) It seems like the master architect was often on holiday. ( I was frequently impressed by a specific feature, only to realize that it doesn't integrate with other features properly, or that it wasn't designed in a way that I would like to use it.) I know these comments are vague and hard to imagine after 3+ years of Vista development, but I will provide fine examples in future articles.

My conclusion is that you shouldn't give Vista to your general population until SP1 (or maybe SP2) has been released. Your users definitely shouldn't see this OS until the applications you rely on have been released specifically for Vista. This being said, my client is committed to Vista and is pressing forward so that when the OS is ready, we will be ready. I, being the client-focused consultant that I am, am all too happy to help. So read the articles, leave some comments, and maybe we can all find our way to delivering some great Vista implementations for our companies. Oh, and Welcome!