US Air Force Begins Move To Windows 7

While many businesses say they wont be upgrading to Windows 7 anytime soon, as they want to continue running their legacy applications, or in some cases, they just don’t need to. But the US Military is leading by example, keeping up to date with the latest technology and now also the latest operating system.

The US Military has begun the long process of migrating over 600,000 computers and laptops from Windows XP and Windows Vista. The process isn’t expected to be completed until December 2011! The chief Air Force Chief Information Officer, Lt. Gen. William Lord described the process as “a daunting task.” It’s not so much the technical challenge that will cause them problems, it’s more the user not being used to the whole new UI.
One of the goals of the air force is to make the move seamless or “almost in real-time”. Given that the vast majority of their systems have already been upgraded to Windows Vista, this move shouldn’t be too big a change. The migration will provide users with the benefits of Vista’s security features without forcing users to experience the inconvenience of an extended transition.
The only main issues will come from users who are still running Windows XP. Since Windows 7 is a completely different UI to Windows XP.
The good news is that Windows 7 will provide many new features, but the downside is that the transition from Windows XP to Windows 7 will force users to change all of their computer settings. “Just when they have their machines set up exactly the way they want it, we push a change,”
The upgrade to Windows 7 also ties in with a new change to the forces hardware. All new computers coming in now will come with Windows 7 pre-loaded on them.
They need around 6 to 9 months to roll out Windows 7 because there is over 19,000 applications running on the network which they hope to reduce down to 10,000, they need to make sure they all work properly. But also by doing this, and upgrading to Windows 7, it’s hoped that it will save the force an incredible $600 – $800 million each year!
It’s great that the air force are beginning to move to Windows 7 now, and there’s also reports that the Navy will do so in January 2011, and the army is said to be sticking with Vista for the moment but are testing out Windows 7.