• You provide a company name, a “matching industry” niche, primary geographic location to situate your company on the planet and in the business context. I indicated a publishing/media company in Texas (USA).
• You indicate the total number of PC users, and what portion of them run desktops and laptops. I indicated 50 with 30 desktops and 20 laptops.
• You provide the number of main sites and branch offices in your operation. I indicated one main site and two branches.
• You describe the mix of OSes currently in use (Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000 or earlier, and other), and identify a target Windows 7 version to which you’ll move (the default is Windows 7 Professional, which is a pretty likely choice except in operations that go whole-hog for Windows 7 Enterprise). I indicated 10% Windows 7, 50% Windows Vista, and 40% XP, but many businesses will be 80-plus percent on XP, and correspondingly lower on those newer OSes.
• You select an upgrade strategy from a short list of possible selections that include an immdiate in-place OS upgrade, immediate PC replacement, compressed PC refresh, or upgrade OS with normal PC refresh cycle. I chose the compressed PC refresh, which means that older PCs will be replaced with newer ones along with an OEM OS upgrade in the process, and newer machines get an acclerated in-place upgrade.

Here’s part of what the tool produced by way of response to this input.

The output from the tool compares benefits, costs, and TCO. Click to view whole image

A word of warning: though the tool is interesting and the results appear compelling, it’s worth considering that Alinean created this tool at Microsoft’s behest, and that it undoubtedly fails to completely mirror real situations on the ground (it is a “Lite” tool, after all) and is probably driven by some friendly assumptions to make Win7 look as good as possible. That said, it’s still fun to play with, and provides some interesting data that may be worth pondering as you work on making a business case for upgrade and/or migration.

The formal title of the TechNet piece is “Step-by Step: Windows 7 Upgrade and Migration.” Here’s a screen shot snippet that shows the lead-in and library entry info:

If you dig into this story, you’ll find useful instructions for the following topics covered:

• Upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7
• Migrate files and settings to a new computer
• Upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7

To those scenarios, I’d also recommend that organizations with some budget also look into the Laplink one-time upgrade/migration licenses. These retail for $65 each on a one-off basis, and can probably be purchased in bulk at some kind of discount (hopefully substantial), and permit applications to be migrated along with files and settings from most older Windows OSes (especially Vista and XP) to Windows 7. This can make the job of migrating machines must easier for admins who may need to do this pronto for some existing installs.

Let me also observe that my experiences in installing Windows 7 so far have been uniformly positive and mostly-problem free. If you want the gory details check out this morning’s ViztaView blog “No Joy on In-place Upgrade; Clean Install Succeeds,” wherein I provide a blow-by-blow recitation of my recent experience in moving my problem-plagued production PC from Vista to Windows 7, with 98% positive results and a solution for all my software problems along the way.

Foley reminds us of Microsoft’s changing stance on enterprise migration to Vista, as follows (the points recounted are hers, the paraphrasing mine):

• Until recently, MS told enterprises to keep migrating to Vista if said migration was underway; otherwise enterprises should skip Vista and go straight to Windows 7
• In May (2009) MS pretty much clammed up about Vista and hasn’t said much new about migrating, pro, con, or indifferent

This led MJF to Mike Angiulo, General Manager for Microsoft’s Planning and PC Ecosystem team (man, wouldn’t you love a title like that? to whom she posed the question about whether or not MS is abandoning its Vista users. Short version of his response: 1. No we’re not. 2. Lots of good stuff for Windows 7 will also work for Vista. FWIW, Dell is also taking a similar line, and the USAF is continuing its Vista deployment, with 90,000 desktops and notebooks already deployed, but is also moving as quickly as possible to get on the Windows 7 bandwagon.

The talkback section includes 150 postings as I write this and they make for fascinating reading. The attitudes span everything from “Vista sucks” and “Microsoft is the spawn of the devil” to “Vista is rock solid, and poses no problems for my organization” with many conceivable intermediate points of view also represented. The fragmented state of the Vista user base is clearly represented, and among those actually interested in using MS operating systems, I see a trend for most enterprise users to favor a move to Windows 7 as soon as it makes sense to do so. Some enterprise users say they won’t move until SP1 comes out, while others say they’ll wait for SP2. Microsoft already knows the road to widespread adoption is long and full of potholes. Let’s just hope that Windows 7 helps to improve road conditions rather than making them worse, as was an all-too-common perception for Vista until SP1 came along.

But only time will tell. Stay tuned!