As is reported by Pressetext Deutschland the analysts of the Gartner Group market research and consulting company on the occasion of the Midsize Enterprise Summit in Paris recommended a gradual changeover to the new Windows Vista. A changeover in the course of a hardware change is said to be the most efficient approach.
The market researchers advise companies using Windows XP not to exclusively use Vista before the year 2008 and to operate several operating system versions parallely instead. »Because this is much more cost-efficientr«, says Mrs. Annette Jump, who is a Gartner analyst. The common opinion that the maintenance of several operating systems at the same time is expensive and more complex was not always valid. Quite often costs entailed by a changeover were not taken into account. A gradual introduction of the new operation system made sense for approx. 60 percent of all companies. These recommendations, however, applied to XP users only. Companies using Windows-2000-systems should change over to Vista as soon as possible. (We already pointed to the risks involved in the use of versions Windows 98 and ME which are not supported any longer.)
The Gartner experts think that after its market introduction any operation system still has to mature for up to 18 months. Thus, on the assumption that Vista is introduced in January 2007, a changeover would therefore make sense only from the middle of the year 2008 on. Concerning Office 2007 a gradual changeover is too complicated and expensive according to Mrs Jump. However, it should be weighed whether this new office version is indeed providing sufficient advantages to staff in order for the changeover to be justified. 