The legal industry has traditionally been conservative when adopting new OS and software versions. Law firms need to know that whatever solution they choose to implement has been tried and tested. This isn’t news to anyone. Let’s see a show of hands of law firm CIOs who have overseen successful deployments of Windows Vista. *crickets*. Yep, that’s pretty much what I figured.
The landscape has changed though with the release of Windows 7. There are a few reasons why Kraft Kennedy is advising our customers to deploy Windows 7 now:
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- Still 6.x: Since the build of Windows 7 is actually 6.1 (Vista is 6.0), most applications that were designed to be compatible with Vista will be compatible with Windows 7. When Microsoft made the jump from 5.1 (XP) to 6.0 (Vista), it took software vendors months to re-write their products to be Vista-compatible. We’ve seen these compatibility issues become more sparse with Windows 7.
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- Better than Vista: Simply speaking, Windows 7 is the OS that Microsoft wanted Vista to be. It looks slick, performs well, and has a lot of useful features that firms will likely take advantage of.
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- From Beta to Omega: Kraft Kennedy started using Windows 7 with our application set as soon as the first Beta was available. Nearly all our staff was using Windows 7 fully before the RTM was released on October 22. In addition, we’ve already developed processes for a completely automated and zero-touch deployment of Windows 7 using Microsoft technologies.
For reasons similar to this, Kraft Kennedy is also advising our Worldox DMS customers to upgrade the latest version, GX2, when implementing the new Windows 7 desktop. GX2 is already supported on Windows 7, and like Windows 7, is using similar (but much improved) code to its previous version, Worldox GX. Kraft Kennedy has had betas running in it’s research lab, and now has the final released version running as well. The new features of GX2 were described in a previous blog post.
This week, Kraft Kennedy will be completing its first 64-bit Windows 7 deployment and Worldox GX2 rollout at a client site. Initial pilot and lab testing has been successful, and the performance of launching Microsoft Word 2007 on 64-bit Windows 7 is a sight to behold! Look for myself and other Kraft Kennedy bloggers to report on the success of this deployment in the coming weeks.
It’s time to start implementing the future today.