U.S. Army upgrades PCs to ... Windows Vista?
The upgrade will include getting rid of all the Office 2003 programs and installing Office 2007 in its place, and is scheduled for a Dec. 31 completion date. Half the Army's computers (they have 744,000 desktop units) have Office 2007 so far and 13 percent (44,000, more or less) are on Vista, which was released in January 2007. Windows 7 is supposed to launch before year's end, so the Army will be fully on Vista sometime after Microsoft's next generation OS is already launched.
According to the Army's press release,
The move is being made to upgrade security and make it even harder for hackers to infiltrate the Army's network. In other words, Matthew Broderick - no more access to WOPR for you.
It may sound a bit silly for the Army to be upgrading so long after the fact, but the military has been testing Vista since its release to determine how best to make all XP applications work in Vista. The Army can't afford to have any of its systems offline due to incompatibility problems. The Army's holding training sessions for its personnel who don't have previous experience with Vista, but many already have it at home, so the learning curve shouldn't be too steep.
For any soldiers or employees who've never used the OS, there are previews and initial training online here and here.
Comments
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I'm pretty sure this is a business decision based on support agreements. Microsoft just beat the U.S. Army, what chance does your company have? |
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Likely the case actually... |
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I was in the IT dept for our unit in the Army. Our unit was small, so it was sort of a volunteer side job. At least on our level, military IT is about a decade behind current practices. Its idea of security is to add yet another layer of Citrix products. Open source is the enemy. Most of the people they actually HIRE to do this stuff haven't ever touched a non-Windows system. I even got red-flagged because I downloaded a Unix password file working on a site during downtime (it was an Apache pw file, not /etc/passwd). I still haven't figured that one out. |
I assume most of the government is like this. They lag behind, but once younger people that have lived around computers there whole life take over I hope it will catch up. |
asdf072:|
If I'm not mistaken they're all gaming in that pic. Also I would have assumed the reason theyre switching is because of licensing and an agreement worked out with Microsoft. (Just noticed 3vi1 said the same thing.) |
^LOL^ |
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They might not *all* be gaming in that pic. The guy holding the steering wheel might have caught on to my super-secret way of quickly navigating spreadsheets. |
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Not quite gaming, but some form of CBT. If you would have clicked-thru to the original article, the caption on the picture says: "A squad of soldiers work in a computer lab at an NCO Academy Warrior Leaders Course." I'm sure that the Army's problem with the virus last year (http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2232&tag=rbxccnbzd1) had a lot to do with accelerating systems upgrade asap for the greatly enhanced managebility and security of Vista over XP, instead of waiting for Win7. |
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USAF is doing the same thing. Have to be all Vista by end of the year. The assumption is we already spent money on the licensing agreement with MS, hence we are just going to make the plunge. Would have been nice to just wait another year or two and go right to Windows 7. |
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