U.S. Army Upgrading to Windows Vista, Office 2007

E

ErikStenger

Registered User
Joined
Mar 12, 2008
Messages
5,925
Age
43
While most of us are gearing up for the upgrade to Windows 7, the U.S. Army is planning to upgrade all of its Windows-based machines to Vista by the end of this year. Going along with this change is also the plan to upgrade all systems from Office 2003 to Office 2007.

About half of the U.S. Army’s 744,000 desktop computers are already running Office 2007, but only 13 percent have so far moved to Windows Vista. The mandate to upgrade came from a Fragmentary Order published November 22, 2008 and was sent out Army-wide as FRAGO 2 to Department of the Army Executive Order 0 56-05.

The upgrade orders apply to systems across both the classified and unclassified networks. The only computers exempt from the upgrades are those on the standalone weapons systems. According to the Army News Service’s report, “First-time Vista users will discover added support for data encryption, a new Windows Explorer, upgraded icons and navigation structure†as well as “graphical replications of clock, calendar, weather and Outlook mail functions.â€ÂÂ

“The Army has been testing Vista since its release and has run it through the Army Golden Master program. The Army Golden Master program is responsible for the release of the Army standard baseline configurations for commonly used computing environments within the Army Enterprise Infrastructure, the team responsible for making sure applications that ran on XP will run on Vista,†said Marcus D. Good, chief of the Information Technology Systems Support Division at DOIM. “We want to handle this migration in a way that makes sense to the organizations fielded.â€ÂÂ

“During this process, we are offering several in-house training sessions, helpful quick-tip handouts and free Army online training,†said Sharon Reed, chief of IT at the Soldier Support Institute. Those part of the U.S. Army can login to an e-learning site and begin training by visiting
http://usarmy.skillport.com and https://train.gordon.army.mil/.
 
meh, i guess its not that bad,we have a lot of really awesome tech guys who are really good at making things work.

But, XP has worked really well at my unit, were not changing it because we run off of the schools network.
 
Microsoft will support XP another year. XP is still being installed in brand new computers instead of Vista.
 
Why do you say that? I've had no issues with Vista, other then UAC, which can easily be disabled.
 
We started migrating about 2 months ago. Vista isn't horrible but it still has issues, it's still much better than I thought it was. Still a resource hog but if you're running more than 4 gigs of RAM who cares? I haven't run into any software compatibility issues just some stupid little annoying quirky shit.
 
People think Vista is terrible for 3 reasons which are unfounded:

1. People with ancient computers that barely run XP try to upgrade to Vista and what do you know? It doesn't work.
2. Those stupid Mac commercials designed to make people (especially young adults) think that PCs are for stupid nerds with glasses and Macs are for cool people. It's all just an advertising campaign. Try getting a new Mac for under 800 bucks.
3. Horror stories about Vista from people who haven't even used it before. I used to bring my laptop to work with me all the time and people would be like 'OMG VISTA IS ON THERE? ISNT IT BAD?!?' It's all just word of mouth stupidity.
 
Well I tried Vista pre-SP1 and didn't like it at all, had no driver support, was buggy when trying to network, and was very slow compared to XP. Now with a quad-core and SP1 Vista is running significantly better than it was, still however it does have its kinks, like my download folder freezing windows for about 20 to 40 seconds every time i open it.
 
meh, vista's fine, most networked computers in a business office or building, have enourmous amounts of resources, and I think boon and soldier put it best
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top