Executive Summary

With five years of development between Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft has worked hard on significant improvements that truly matter to businesses. Security has been significantly enhanced with User Account Control, which limits the damage that viruses and other malicious software can do, and with BitLocker Drive Encryption, which conceals corporate data on the hard disk from unauthorized eyes. Deployment has been streamlined, and Vista is more amenable to centralized management than any of its predecessors. In a market in which sales of portable or mobile computers nearly equals that of traditional desktops, Vista brings better manageability, configuration, and wireless networking to mobile computers, and desktop networking has also been strengthened.

Microsoft hopes that Vista will see faster business adoption than Windows XP, which, despite being promoted as a “smarter and faster” tool that would make business users more productive, was ignored by many organizations until the security improvements of Windows XP SP2.