Office 2010 Professional Plus Gartner Businesses

Windows seven hasn;t even hit the Release Candidate test phase,Office 2010, but already analysts at Gartner are advising enterprise users they shouldn;t plan to watch for Support Pack one (SP1) to arrive prior to planning deployments.From a March 12 research notice by Gartner analyst Michael Silver (a hyperlink to which Microsoft is distributing to several press people):“The first Support Pack for Windows seven is not necessary for the operating system;s stability and security readiness. However,Microsoft Office 2010 Standard, organizations likely won;t be ready to deploy Windows seven just before SP1 ships,Office 2010 Professional Plus, so they will include it in their initial deployments.”The first part of Silver;s statement is, no doubt, music to Microsoft;s ears. Remember how much time and energy Microsoft officials spent trying to make the case that Vista was so solid that customers didn;t need to wait around until SP1 to deploy it? (OK — stop laughing now.)Gartner is now saying what Microsoft officials have tried to assert for the past three years: SP1 shouldn;t be the milestone businesses await before even starting to strategy for new OS deployments. Silver wrote:“Conventional wisdom has been that organizations need to watch for the first Services Pack to ship before they deploy a new client OS. This used to be a necessity. The availability of beta software to test the new product was not as broad as it is today, and folks expected the initial release to be buggy and unstable. The first Company Pack usually would ship approximately nine to 12 months after the initial OS shipment, and would usually represent a marked improvement in stability. Today, SP1 does not represent the milestone it used to.”It;s actually the second part of Silver;s statement — that most organizations won;t be ready to deploy Windows 7 prior to SP1 ships anyway — cuts to the heart of the matter, however.Most businesses cannot turn on a dime. Even if they wanted to rush to deploy Windows 7 as soon as it is released, few would be able to do so,Office 2010 Home And Business Key, given the amount of app-compatibility testing typically required. Gartner is estimating it will take even the most Windows 7-enamored businesses 12 to 18 months to deploy the new OS. And by that time — if Microsoft doesn;t do what it did with Windows Server 2008 and declare that SP1 was already built into the first release — SP1 for Windows seven should be out.It may seem early to be thinking about Windows seven deployments — especially for the growing amount of businesses that are just now starting to implement widescale Vista deployments they;ve been working on for months, if not years. But if Microsoft really does release Win seven to manufacturing in Q3 of this calendar year, as still sounds likely,Genuine Office 2010, maybe it;s not as early as it seems….What do you think of Gartner;s premise? Will SP1 be an irrelevant deployment milestone for you when planning around future Windows deployments. Why or why not?