Alice Kærast

Windows 7 SP1 is expected to be released late 2010/early 2011.  We’re not expecting any new features, and so whilst we ordinarily recommend waiting until the first service pack before starting to use any Microsoft product we strongly believe that Windows 7 is ready for use now.  It’s certainly a lot nicer than Vista and has similar performance to XP but with lots of extra features.  To gain the full featureset you need at least professional and a Windows 2008R2 server, but even without it’s still well worth the upgrade.

Windows 7 has been written about in great detail, but if you need some more reasons on why it’s worth upgrading to then here’s a few to take a look at:

• Open Search integration, together with Windows Search Server Express
• User Access Control – whilst Vista added this, Windows 7 makes it less annoying and therefore worth using.  Always log in to your Windows 7 machine as a regular user, and when you need to do something unusual it’ll ask you to enter an admin password.  This vastly reduces the number of drive-by malware infections (presuming you don’t just enter your password everytime you are asked)
• Bitlocker, enforceable using Group Policy, means that you can deny writing to USB devices without encryption. (not available on all versions, and requires Server 2008R2)
• Applocker – stop users from running certain applications.  Whilst this has been available for a long time, Applocker in Windows 7 makes it usable.  You can trust all software from Microsoft, any version of Adobe Reader greater than 9.3 and deny flash whatever version it is.
• Problem steps recorder lets users record a video of what they did to cause a problem and then send it to the helpdesk.  Previously you could use remote assistance to watch the user cause the problem, but now you can receive the video and watch it whilst drinking a coffee instead of staying on the phone to the customer.
• XP Mode (pro and enterprise, can be made to work in other versions) creates a virtual machine for running software which isn’t compatible with Windows 7 or isn’t compatible with other software running on your machine.  It uses virtual machines and RDP but is completely transparent to the end-user who thinks they are just running the application directly.  Another use for this is to publish applications, instead of installing them on a machine on first-use (which takes time and can cause conflicts) you just run them from a published virtual machine.
• Internet Explorer 8 when used on Windows 7 can be made to be very secure, with a locked-down mode allowing only access to a temp folder

Internet Explorer 9 is expected to be released at some point in 2010.  It will have better performance, particularly in its Javascript rendering which will make Ajax websites run much smoother.  It will use hardware accelerated graphics, which not only adds to the increased performance but looks much better.  Finally it will support most of HTML5, although not completely.

Small Business Server still remains a powerful offering to small businesses, but Essential Business Server is a relatively new addition which allows for between 50 and 300 users whilst Home Server can be used by very small companies with low technology requirements.

Home Server provides you with file storage, full image backups of desktops and Terminal Server Gateway and is built on Windows 2003.  It obviously doesn’t provide you with Domains or Active Directory, but it may be enough for you.  A new version is expected late 2010 which will be based on 2008R2.

Office 2010’s main selling point is better integration.  The ribbon has made it to all applications including Access, Outlook and Sharepoint.  Excel gets sparklines, Word gets collaborative editing (though can’t beat Etherpad or Google Docs yet), but the real changes are in Sharepoint which sees much better integration with everything.  If you aren’t already using Sharepoint then give WSS3 (a free download) a spin to see if it suits your business.

Exchange 2010, which is out now, adds some really impressive scalability improvements.  Continuous availability is a key feature, meaning users always have access to their mailboxes despite any backend work which may be taking place.  A Client Access middle tier is added, so you can have several CA servers which do caching and the real Exchange server will see very little traffic.  Outlook Web Access is much richer, introducing mail tips which alert you before sending an email to things like Out of Office statuses and sending documents outside of your domain.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2010 is due out towards the end of this year.  It provides voip, collaboration and instant messaging integrated into Microsoft Office.  Presence is a key addition, and means that the server can always know where you are.  Whilst this may seem creepy, and for many will introduce privacy concerns, the things you can do with it are really impressive.  For starters, you can have a single phone number which follows you wherever you are, but you can also integrate it into all your other Microsoft products.  Automated tasks can be sent only to people who are currently in the office, when receiving an email you can see if the person is available to phone back, important emails can be sent to you by sms or TTS when you are in your car.

Commerce Server 2009 was released last year, an e-commerce solution allowing you to sell your products online and link in to all of your other Microsoft software.

CRM and Dynamics makes developing applications for business intelligence much easier.  This, together with much of the new Visual Studio and .Net features are perhaps not of interest to most small businesses, so contact us if you need to know more.

Hyper V 2.0 introduced in Windows 2008R2 makes virtualisation much nicer, though still needs extra management tools to make it usable.  HyperV on it’s own is not a competitor to Vmware, HyperV with management tools is what you should be comparing and it’s a close-call on which would be better for your business – though HyperV is probably best if you need to do anything beyond the basics.

Desktop Virtualisation has come a long way, and is seriously worth looking at, but needs serious consideration as to whether it is right for your business.  When considering TCO, you need to consider what business benefits it gives you and also whether the lower hardware specs of the desktops means a reduced risk of theft.

MS Forefront is Microsoft’s new security system, based on the Stirling Wave.  It means that anti-virus software on the gateway, mail server and desktops all talk to each other.  If the gateway detects a large number of outgoing emails from a certain machine it can automatically tell that machine to run a full virus scan.  Again, worth looking at but also consider the requirements to get it running.

Microsoft SQL 2008 was capable of managing databases upto 7Tb but 2008R2 increased that to 10-30Tb depending on the hardware, Dell and HP are now offering custom MS-SQL hardware which is worth considering for very large databases.  Ms SQL 2010 is due out in the first half of the year and will allow for large MS SQL server farms for databases of over 100 Tb (or you could just use Azure).  Perhaps the most important offering in MS SQL 2008R2 and 2010 though is the self-service business intelligence and reporting which means that IT pros can get the information they want without having to talk to developers.