Fortunately, this is one area where Microsoft has done a considerable amount of work -- especially from an eat-your-own-dog-food perspective. 'For us, deploying Vista definitely meant deploying Office 2007 simultaneously,' says Ron Markezich, vice president of managed solutions at Microsoft, and formerly the company's CIO. Microsoft at present already has 64,000 Vista desktops deployed and previously had 107,000 Exchange 2007 mailboxes rolled out. Markezich cites the new Windows Imaging capability that's included with Vista as a key driver for the decision to perform both product upgrades at the same time.

'It's just so much easier than with previous imaging packages,' says Chad Lewis, Microsoft's Vista deployment product lead. 'Remember, we don't just deploy Vista or Office once, like our customers. We've had to deploy several builds of both at regular intervals. The ability to keep our WIM [Windows Imaging Format] file library small and easily tailored has made the whole process just so much easier.'

Microsoft has configured its upgrade process to allow certain users to upgrade their own machines at their own pace when going from Windows XP/Office 2003 to Vista/Office 2007. But once on the new platform, Microsoft uses a forced SMS (Systems Management Server) 2003 upgrade process to make sure that users on Vista stay current with new builds. 'The nice thing is that we can use the same WIM library for both operations,' Lewis says.

Gut check: software compatibility

That's a rosy picture Microsoft paints for its own wares, but even with this brace of new deployment tools, Vista's radically redesigned new innards will still have a significant impact on mission-critical line-of-business apps.