Key reasons to upgrade to Windows Vista

Windows Vista helps companies be more successful by:

Empowering users to find and use information

Enabling mobile workers to stay connected and productive in and out of office

Helping companies to make corporate systems and information more secure

Making it easier to deploy and manage company PCs

Find and Use Information
The success of a business depends on the success of its people. Making your employees more productive and facilitating communication is the main reason you invest in Information Technology. Yet, with most tools today, it is difficult for employees to quickly find the information they need and leverage information technology to its full potential. Windows Vista is designed as a People-Ready solution so they can easily find and use information.

• The fast, integrated desktop search in Windows Vista helps make it easier for users to find the information they need, even if it is on a shared drive or other network resource. Windows Vista Desktop Search is integrated throughout the operating system—in the start menu, control panel, and their document folders—making it easy to find the information they are looking for. Users can also tag a file with "metadata" to indicate that it belongs to a certain project or other category, making it easier to search, filter and organize their files. 
  
  Once the user has entered the search information, Windows Vista helps make it easier to identify the right data by displaying high-resolution thumbnails of the content. Users can dynamically adjust the size of these thumbnails to make them large enough for users to know whether they've found the right document without opening it. The user can then store the search results in a "search folder" to be recalled for later use.
  
  
• Windows Vista helps make users more productive managing online information as well. With tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer 7, users can visually scroll to the right page. Web page printing is also improved so you can capture all of the information, without cutting off part of the page.
  
  
• The most recognizable improvement in Windows Vista is the new, Windows Aero interface—its glass-like, transparent windows allow users to multi-task bringing focus to current window while allowing easy access to the rest of the desktop. Live icons that give users a preview of the document and new ways to navigate the windows on the desktop help users find what they are looking for in less time.

Enable Mobile Workforce
While mobile PCs can help improve employee productivity, supporting mobile users in the enterprise can add complexity to the IT environment. Securely granting access to employees when and where they need it often required multiple sign-ons. Additionally, laptops can pose risks to sensitive business information. New tools in Windows Vista can enable your organization to realize the benefits of mobile computing while helping to reduce complexity and risks.

• Windows Vista is built with mobility in mind, the new Windows Mobility Center puts the most commonly used controls, such as battery, brightness, and presentation settings, all in one place. Improved power management lets your mobile work force be productive longer and reduces boot-up delays when resuming from stand-by.
  
  
• Great ideas are often the result of collaboration. Windows Vista helps make it easier to effectively communicate and collaborate with co-workers, partners, and customers, anywhere your business takes you. Features like the Network Center and Network Setup Wizard make it easier to get connected. The Windows Meeting Space technology enables you to broadcast and share documents and presentations with multiple users, making meetings more productive.
  
  
• To help address the risks of mobile computing, Windows Vista includes the latest wireless security protocols so users can connect more securely. BitLocker Drive Encryption in Windows Vista Enterprise helps protect your company data on the mobile PC, in case a laptop is lost or stolen.

Improve Security and Compliance
Unfortunately, in today’s digital world, computers are becoming an increasingly attractive target for criminals hoping to steal information or do harm to your business, people, or customers. Sophisticated social engineering attacks can trick your employees into revealing confidential information, or target your customers and damage your reputation. On top of that, new government regulations require high standards for security and data protection to avoid penalties. To help your company address the risk and expense associated with security and compliance, we are committed to providing multiple layers of protection in Windows Vista.

• Windows Vista is the first desktop operating system released since we began the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Initiative. Microsoft developers now receive ongoing security training and we hire leading security experts to perform thorough security audits and testing. The end result is a fundamentally more secure platform, harder to exploit, with less need for patching.
  
  
• To mitigate threats from malicious software such as viruses, malware, and root kits, Windows Vista includes Internet Explorer 7 Protected Mode, which is unique to Windows Vista and prevents the silent install of malicious code. Windows Defender provides built-in malware protection for your PCs.
  
  
• In order to maintain a more secure, compliant environment, is it important to identify who is attempting to use the computer and control what resources they have access to. Windows Vista helps make this much easier by having built-in support for strong user authentication. Additionally, Windows Vista helps make it easier for companies to comply with internal and external regulations through granular event logging, auditing and tracking for security events.
  
  
  
• To control access, companies face a difficult tradeoff: Do they give users full administrator permission and accept the security and compliance risk? Or do they limit the privileges of the users and face lower application compatibility and user productivity? Windows Vista User Account Control capability helps make the choice easy giving users the power to do more things on their own, with greater application compatibility than on previous versions of Windows while reducing the attack surface area of your company PCs.
  
  
• Windows Vista has multiple ways to help protect your data, and recover it when you need to. Shadow Copy technology automatically stores versions of files as users work on them—even without configuring a formal backup—so they can easily retrieve an earlier version of a document they may have accidentally deleted or if they made changes they want to undo.

Optimize Desktop Infrastructure
Windows Vista helps empower people to make a greater impact, but are the benefits outweighed by the costs of upgrading and maintaining a new operating system? Windows Vista enables IT efficiencies by providing technology, tools, and best practices to optimize your desktop infrastructure and help reduce IT costs.

• Managing desktop images may be expensive today because IT departments may maintain and test separate OS images for each language and type of computer in their company. With Windows Vista’s new imaging technology, companies can deploy a single OS image to different types of computer hardware and machines in different languages. New deployment tools not only simplify migration to Windows Vista, but provide ongoing costs savings because the new images are easier to maintain, update, and deploy to new users.
  
  
• To ease the initial migration to Windows Vista, Microsoft provides the Application Compatibility Toolkit version 5.0, aligning its release with the release of Windows Vista. The availability of this tool, as well as the online community we are building for customers, partners and vendors to share their testing results, will significantly ease application compatibility testing for enterprise customers.
  
  
• Windows Vista also has new tools to manage your desktops after they are deployed. We are providing over 500 new group policy objects to address the most critical management scenarios. For example, you can now centrally manage Power Settings, which can save as much as $50 per PC a year in energy costs, or even which types of devices users can and cannot install.
  
  
• When a system error occurs caused by an application or device, in many cases, Windows Vista will automatically attempt to heal itself, avoiding user interruptions and unnecessary help desk calls. If Windows cannot fix the problem automatically, a built-in diagnostics log is created that can walk the user through step by step to solve the problem. For instance, the new Startup Repair Tool can automatically repair many cases of unbootable systems. If users do need support, Vista also includes tools such as the Reliability and Performance Monitor, improved Remote Assistance, and the new Event Viewer so the helpdesk staff can get the user up and running in less time.
  
  
• The new network stack in Windows Vista can make it easier for your IT department to secure the network through the use of security policies based on IPsec. Built-in network diagnostics enable the end-user to resolve many connectivity issues without having to call the Help Desk, increasing productivity and reducing the cost of support.

This article was taken from the Microsoft Vista Website