Microsoft Office Pro 2007 Windows 7 To wait or no

With Windows seven poised to begin personal testing any time now and also to ship by late 2009, numerous enterprise people are wondering regardless of whether they will need to just skip Windows Vista all together and wait for seven as an alternative.Microsoft, not surprisingly, is advising clients versus taking a pass on Vista. As component of a new white paper aimed at influencing small business people who're evaluating when and whether to move to Windows Vista, Microsoft is advocating enterprise customers should certainly migrate to Vista faster instead of later.The white paper — “The Company Value of Windows Vista: Five Reasons to Deploy Now” — doesn;t include a lot of new data; rather, it revisits the company features Microsoft built into Vista and highlights some of the new deployment tools and case-study examples of companies who have migrated to Vista. But it does offer Microsoft;s official guidance on Windows seven deployments. From the paper:“There is no desire to wait for Windows seven. It is a goal of the Windows 7 release to minimize application compatibility for clients who have deployed Windows Vista since there was considerable kernel and device level innovation in Windows Vista. The Windows seven release is expected to have only minor changes in these areas. Clients who're still using Windows XP when Windows seven releases will have a similar application compatibility experience moving to Windows 7 as exists moving to Windows Vista from Windows XP.”Lee Nicholls, Director of Global Solutions with Getronics — a Microsoft integration partner that sells heavily into the financial services and manufacturing industries — agreed with Microsoft;s compatibility warning.“There could be even less compatibility between XP and Windows 7,Office 2010 Home And Business Key,” based on what Microsoft ends up providing in terms of new migration and deployment tools,Microsoft Office Pro 2007, Nicholls said.The jump between Windows XP and Windows seven could be a big one, while the one from Vista to Windows seven must be fairly minor, Nicholls said. And given that “Windows seven is going to be a superset of Windows Vista,Microsoft Office Standard 2010, it;s not essentially something worth waiting for,” Nicholls added.In its new white paper, Microsoft also used a timing argument to convince company customers to upgrade now:“Historically, mainstream deployment occurs not when Microsoft releases a product but 18 months later on. While the mainstream deployment cycle is beginning for Windows Vista now, it isn’t expected to begin for Windows 7 until at least mid-2011. With Microsoft set to release a brand new version of Windows every three years, there will always be a brand new version on the horizon during a typical evaluation period. This means that customers must not base their deployment decisions on the anticipated release-to-market (RTM) date but on an ‘evaluation completion date,; sometime after RTM and dependent on the customer.”Microsoft pointed to a recent report by the Gartner Group,Office 2010 Discount, entitled “Don’t Skip Windows Vista Entirely,Genuine Windows 7,” as further fodder.“XP goes end-of-life before (Windows) seven comes out,” partner Nicholls said. (Mainstream support from Microsoft for XP ends in April 2009. Customers who want continued support from Microsoft have to pay for it after that date.)Getronics is advising customers it won;t be worth spending their entire IT budgets just to pay for extending their support for Windows XP as opposed to biting the bullet and moving to Vista, he said.Organization users: Are you moving to Vista before Windows seven? Why/why not?