Windows 7 for IT Pros

On Sunday 26th October I attended a Windows 7 Reviewer’s Workshop in Los Angeles as Microsoft’s guest. This was the first time that Windows 7 was demonstrated to a non-Microsoft audience.

There has been plenty of available information about the new, most popular features in Windows 7: enhanced UI, touch technology, better media playback and libraries, just to mention a few. But what does Windows 7 have to offer to IT Pros, and how will it integrate into current environments?

The most important thing to realise about Windows 7 is that it represents the next major step in the evolution of Windows. As such, it leverages completely off the technology introduced in Windows Vista and takes it to the next stage. A major implication of this is that if your environment isn’t ready for Vista, it definitely isn’t ready for Windows 7.

This is something I’ve been writing about for a while now – as I encounter people who are strongly opposed to Windows Vista for a variety of reasons (it’s amazing how many of them have never even used it – more evidence to back up the findings of Microsoft’s “Mojave” experiment), and state that they’re going to migrate from Windows XP straight to Windows 7 and bypass Vista entirely. For home users, of course that’s their choice, and their loss. But for business customers and IT pros, the decision to skip an operating system shouldn’t be made lightly.

One way of looking at Windows 7 is that it is to Windows Vista what Windows XP was to Windows 2000 – based on very similar architecture and almost interchangeable, depending on your environment. So, all of the important considerations to be made when moving to Windows Vista still have to be made when considering Windows 7, and all the same work has to be done. In fact, if you want to prepare for Windows 7, try deploying Windows Vista. If you’re already heading down that path, then Windows 7 will fit right into your environment with hardly any fuss.

So for IT pros, what does Windows 7 bring to the table?

Compatibility

There was some confusion as to why Windows 7 was so named, when its major kernel revision number is the same as Windows Vista (version 6). This was a calculated move by Microsoft to maximise compatibility with third-party applications which have hard-coded version checks built in. This situation caused a lot of problems with Windows XP applications when they were run on Windows Vista, so with Windows 7 we shouldn’t see anywhere near the same amount of grief.

Application Crash Resiliency

Windows 7 can actively monitor crashing applications, determine what’s causing them to crash, and can apply a shim on the fly to circumvent the crash. Natively, this takes a few tries as the system detects a crash, watches the crash and then applies the fix, but the underlying technology is available for OEMs and IT pros to proactively fix crashing applications across a corporate network.

Note that this doesn’t fix the root cause of the crash – this still has to be dealt with by the application developers. However it does provide a far better end-user experience and greatly reduces lost productivity.

Energy Efficiency

Windows 7 can run diagnostics across any system to determine whether there is any problematic hardware or processes hogging CPU cycles, both of which can adversely impact energy usage and battery life.

This is of particular concern to highly mobile users, and to businesses who are starting to factor in the energy cost of running client hardware into the TCO of each machine.

Deployment

Windows 7 now has the ability to maintain all hard links to system and user data during deployment, which means that all user data is maintained during an in-place upgrade. There’s not much more information available on this at the moment, and the process was glossed over during the reviewers’ workshop, but we’ll get more technical information and make it available.

Mobile Data Protection

Windows 7 now supports BitLocker encryption on removable media like USB keys. System administrators can use group policy to enforce encryption on any removable storage plugged into a domain system before it is written to, thus automatically protecting corporate data before it’s taken offsite.

It’s not clear whether the encrypted media can only be read by another Windows 7 machine (or indeed, only by the original machine), or whether this functionality will be extended to Windows Vista in time. We’re checking with Microsoft on these points and will publish the information as it comes to hand.

Problem Steps Reporter

Ever tried to assist a user over the phone, only to tear your hair out as it becomes increasingly obvious that they really don’t know what they’re looking at, can’t describe it to you and can’t give you the information you really need to help them?

Windows 7 introduces a new troubleshooting system which allows the user to take step-by-step screenshots of their system and bundle the package along with relevant technical data to the support team. The user doesn’t need to do much beyond Record, Stop and Send, but it gives support technicians the information they need to assist the user quickly, reduces call time and lowers frustration levels and blood pressure on both ends of the phone.

AppLocker

AppLocker gives admins the ability to create lists using GPOs of approved or forbidden applications within the domain environment. The policies are created using very new and nifty dynamic policy wizards (hopefully we’ll see more of these in different areas of group policy), and admins can quickly define a policy for individual applications.

Apps can be locked down to specific vendors (eg: allow everything from Microsoft), specific products or builds (eg: allow Microsoft Word 2007 and 2003 but not XP or 2000) or somewhere in between (eg: allow Microsoft Word 2003 and above).

Microsoft recommends that the default should be to initially deny everything and expand from there. While this is definitely the best practise for any security policy, it might prove to be too difficult to retrofit such measures into an existing environment, given the potential for user impact during the initial stages of policy configuration.

Windows Troubleshooting Platform

Windows 7 uses an enhanced troubleshooting system which allows users to better assist themselves when problems arise.

This system runs through a range of PowerShell scripts to diagnose the current system running state, looks at active processes, system services and so on, to build up an overview of what the problem might be and offer practical steps to the user to resolve the issue.

Microsoft have built this system around the support questions raised with Microsoft Premier Support, and have determined that it can fix the top 100 most commonly-asked questions.

This system will be great for end-users, but potentially not so widely used by business customers who, given the choice between fixing something themselves or picking up the phone and calling internal support, seem to always take the latter option.

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We’re still in the early stages of publically-available information on Windows 7, but so far it’s shaping up to be a very solid OS, offering plenty to IT pros. We’ll keep bringing you information as it comes to hand and through our own testing.


James Bannan is a network manager.