Do I have time for this?
Thoughts from the vaults...
Thursday 29 November 2007, 2:00 PM
Vista... The monster in the shadows?
As a small child, I would sometimes have nightmares about a monster which lurked in the shadows beneath my bed, all teeth & claws, sensed, but not seen. 35 years later I still have vague recollections of the anxiety this imaginary monster induced, and lately I've begun to experience something startlingly similar...
Last week I was on a client site, a commercial vehicle rental outfit which largely looks after it's own IT. Their accounts bod/IT Manager had recently ordered a trio of Dell Vostro PC's and these had, by default, shipped with Vista pre-installed.
Undeterred, he gamely set about deploying them in lieu of some ageing Fujitsu-Siemens boxes and quite successfully too, even managing to re-install & configure some tricky financial software in the process. So far so good.
The real trouble began the following day when three hard pressed administrative staff found themselves looking at a colourful new OS whose apparently alien layout soon had their "How do I" tangled up with their "Where is my..." and generally feeling completely at sea.
Days later I'm in the office trying to disable some of the "Are you sure?" warnings, and providing a crash course in Windows Vista file management. The search features in particular seemed to be an issue for them, and despite the best part of a day's instruction, Betty on the booking desk was still struggling with it.
Now all of this boils down to a lack of training. My client freely admits that he hadn't realised the machines would ship with Vista, and that he should have been better prepared. He also said that Vista was "different for no real benefit". He's right on both counts.
The trouble is that very few SME's will provide training on the OS to their staff in advance of a roll out, and almost all SME's will be force fed an OEM diet of Vista from early next year, or sooner depending on hardware and vendor choices.
This is the proverbial monster lurking in the shadows, a hulking great beast with colourful fur and hidden claws. These days it's diet is your typical small company, and we'd all better be ready for it, because one thing's for sure... Betty on the booking desk won't be.
Last week I was on a client site, a commercial vehicle rental outfit which largely looks after it's own IT. Their accounts bod/IT Manager had recently ordered a trio of Dell Vostro PC's and these had, by default, shipped with Vista pre-installed.
Undeterred, he gamely set about deploying them in lieu of some ageing Fujitsu-Siemens boxes and quite successfully too, even managing to re-install & configure some tricky financial software in the process. So far so good.
The real trouble began the following day when three hard pressed administrative staff found themselves looking at a colourful new OS whose apparently alien layout soon had their "How do I" tangled up with their "Where is my..." and generally feeling completely at sea.
Days later I'm in the office trying to disable some of the "Are you sure?" warnings, and providing a crash course in Windows Vista file management. The search features in particular seemed to be an issue for them, and despite the best part of a day's instruction, Betty on the booking desk was still struggling with it.
Now all of this boils down to a lack of training. My client freely admits that he hadn't realised the machines would ship with Vista, and that he should have been better prepared. He also said that Vista was "different for no real benefit". He's right on both counts.
The trouble is that very few SME's will provide training on the OS to their staff in advance of a roll out, and almost all SME's will be force fed an OEM diet of Vista from early next year, or sooner depending on hardware and vendor choices.
This is the proverbial monster lurking in the shadows, a hulking great beast with colourful fur and hidden claws. These days it's diet is your typical small company, and we'd all better be ready for it, because one thing's for sure... Betty on the booking desk won't be.
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