Rolandes Ramblings

So, a little over a week ago I get the email from Microsoft that they are having a local Launch event for Vista and Office 2007. Knowing there would be freebies involved and the fact that I have been completely out of touch with M$ latest developments, I signed up.

I chose the half day morning event for what they called “IT Pros” covering Vista deployment, Office 2007 features and benefits, and Exchange 2007. The Vista walk-through was totally as expected. Lots of cool eye-candy, marketing, and some value-add functionality. Ooh…aahh…

However, to their credit, they actually have done a little more than the superficial repackaging of XP SP2 and started to take some steps in the right direction. They have incorporated the idea of normal user rights (even for Admin acounts) and elevated rights (similar to Unix sudo). No account just has carte blanche rights to the system as in previous releases. When attempting to install something or make an administrative change beyond the rights of the current user, a dialog box is displayed prompting for an account userID and password with the proper privileges to complete the task. Even when logged in with an Administrator account, the user is still prompted with a dialog box prompting the user to continue with elevated rights to complete the executed task. The idea here is that you never (shouldn’t ever) have to login with the Administrator account again. By regularly using a lower privilege account, you reduce the risk to the system of having malware/spyware auto-install transparently. Now when you are accidentally back doored a dialog box will appear asking for the username and password to gain the necessary elevated access which raises the red flag. Another layer of protection. I am sure it will turn into another nuisance box but over time they will iron out the usability issues other security holes it may present.

Another hidden feature is the ability for the system to allow user specific registry hives. This can allow a user to install software that previously may not have worked on XP or Win2K because they did not have administrative rights. Now Vista can essentially play a Jedi mind trick on the software being installed to make it think that it is actually installing to a root portion of the registry that it may not actually have the right to access.
The other great benefit they have added is a completely overhauled backup, imaging, repair, and recovery system. They now allow for incremental imaging and the ability to patch an image offline without completely rebuilding a system. Even if you completely destroy your installation somehow, you can still run a system refresh which will capture all of the user state and rebuild the system and then apply the previous user configurations automatically. The system also has a little more artificial intelligence built into its self repair and recovery tools. If critical DLLs or COM files get deleted or permissions changed, the system can actually repair these issues itself.

So, is it worth going out and buying a copy of Vista right now to replace your Windows XP SP2 install? Not really. Yeah they have some really cool visual effects and have made a lot more headway with desktop searching. But it isn’t worth the kind of money they are looking for right now. The only feature I can see being a big benefit to myself is the simplified approach to system imaging and backup. It would save me many hours of pain and torture when replacing a hard drive or recovering from system instability due to poorly behaving software.

Office 2007 adds some nice new features as well. But the real heart of the update is the completely redesigned user interface. I have already installed Office 2007 Professional on my workstation and am liking what I have experienced so far. They have arranged the interface in Word so that the most frequently and commonly used functions are much more quickly accessible within “ribbons” at the top of the window. When you highlight text, the most common actions become quickly accessible. This will definitely be a huge time saver but will take some getting used to. After years of knowing exactly what menus to drill down to for certain features, it will take some getting used to. They have also included a new document format for saving called docx. Based on the OpenXML standard, (finally) the documents can be modified in a text editor or automatically by scripts. This document format also provides a significant savings in file size of 50% or greater to the original doc format. Of course there is all sorts of new eye candy within Powerpoint. They have basically made many of the graphical entities much more automated removing alot of burden from the user to customize. Excel also includes a lot of enhanced data manipulation features making it much easier for the user to identify or demonstrate trending analysis within the document with a few clicks. Finally with Outlook, I haven’t noticed much that is new here. The user interface is a little more flexible than in previous releases allowing the user greater customization and quick views of the To-Do list within any window. As is standard with all new Microsoft releases, everything is a little more eye pleasing and visually attractive.
Bottom line is that the new user interface is a huge plus for this Office release. It will make life a lot easier for many. Is it worth running out to the store now and dropping $500 on Office 2007 Professional? No. If you already have Office 2003, you can wait. Save your money. The new interface is pretty but not that pretty.