The advent of a new operating system in any organization is inevitably disruptive to some degree. However, some organizations manage the transition in a calm, planned, and reasoned manner. Others may fall a bit more into the frenzied and frazzled category! Readiness assessment goes a long way to lower everyone’s blood pressure and minimize unpleasant surprises.

There has been great interest in the subject of Windows 7 in recent months, perhaps most strongly from organizations that passed over Windows Vista and are looking at a migration from Windows XP. When coming from XP, there is a much greater likelihood of potential issues in terms of hardware and software compatibility. Organizations upgrading from Vista have far fewer such concerns: Vista is newer than XP, true, but beyond that, Windows 7 leverages the Vista device driver model, and Microsoft has stated that applications that work on Vista will generally work on Windows 7.

Microsoft has provided some resources and tools that can help. This white paper takes an introductory look at some of them, and makes some suggestions for evaluating your organization’s readiness for Windows 7 on the client.