U.S. Army Upgrading to Windows Vista, Office 2007

[Guest]

before official release of vista, I read that it will be very user friendly and no trainings is needed are being highlighted as one of the advantage for upgrading the sytem(vs switching other o/s). So why every large rollout of vista job that I saw, has always allocated a huge amount of resources to 'MS training'.

 

[zodiacfml]

is it 64bit?

 

[atnoslen]

As was said earlier by apmyhr, I believe many of these comments are due to a lack of knowledge in extremely large scale network deployment and government/military operations.

1) Windows is easy to use and most US citizens are familiar with basic operation reducing the amount of training required per soldier.

2) There are many qualified (and many more unqualified) technicians both active duty and civilian. Moving to a proprietary UNIX system would reduce the experienced active duty technicians by a severe amount without having an additional pool of experienced civilians to recruit. Right now it is easy to find an Exchange/SQL/Sharepoint/ASP technician or developer as the civilian market is inundated with these personnel.

3) There are thousands of programs being used on military systems designed for Windows, some written by army programmers, many more commercially. Every single one would need to be ported or designed from scratch on a proprietary UNIX system. Or some from of Windows emulation would be required defeating the purpose. Add independent support for each one we would have a collective IT department larger than the current fighting force.

As for the move to Vista, support for the OS is VITAL to our military. Imagine a vulnerability is found in XP (not too hard to imagine), but XP is no longer supported. Now add hundreds of thousands of computers in the Department of Defense susceptible to that vulnerability without any hope of a timely or even promise of a patch/fix. The move to Vista is logical insofar as national security requires an updatable OS. And based upon the sheer number of patches I see every week I feel better moving to Vista.

Although my personal preference would be to move to a virtual environment with thin-clients. Most users are e-mail/web users with a smaller percentage requiring intensive graphics (falconview, full motion video, audio, ect..) or external devices initially incompatible with thin-clients (ID card generators, proprietary military data readers, ect...) Would make patching fast and easy, mobility is increased with TCO (read your tax dollars) reduced. 1/3 of computers are life-cycled (replaced) every year for upgrades. Thin-clients would significantly reduce the edge life-cycle cost (although some would be refocused to terminal server upgrades). There are some cases where thin-clients are already used, but is very few and far between.

The point is, the Army (and the rest of the DoD for that matter) are doing exactly the right thing, even if at first reaction they seem crazy. The Army is just too big to not do the simple thing.

 

[Donuts]

To the experts posting here about security in Vista, stating that the army will get hacked. Please explain how. To me your comments seem silly because, well let's be honest here, you really cant say how. And anyway, if the network was compromised, the first place I'd look was at my network dept who clearly failed at securing the perimiter. Should a device be stolen I'm pretty sure that Vista would have that covered as the drive would have been secured using encryption and certificate services, but you already knew that since everyone who uses Linux is a Windows expert.

As for support ending, a contract as big as the US Army will be an EA agreement with MS. MS also has to move on a deprecate older technology. Most of the linux supporters here have no clue how large orginisations work and somehow akin their Linux distro on their workstation/desktop/laptop et al. with being capable of working for very large networks like the US Army. As far as I know, Linux is nowhere near to the level of Active Directory and Group Policies and I can see why the army would stick with the company who know how to maintain interoperabilty and management between their products.

I would think that the army chose to upgrade to Office 2007 because of its integrated functionality with Windows Rights Management Services and Active Directory. With RMS you have the ability to limit who can read/edit/print/copy etc documents and also ensure documents expire after a certain date. I can alot of reasons the army would use such features.

As for the blue screening issues, ever since XP came out the amount of blue-screening has dropped dramatically and even less so with each release of Windows. Somehow I cant equate a blue screen with launching nukes. A statement like that makes you either un-informed or uneducated and possibly the reason why you do not work for a very large and lucrative organisation.

The reason the army wont use Linux is because the idea of FOSS/GNU or whatever the word-of-the-day is, is fundamentally flawed. Money makes this world go around. The world cannot accept the idea of "free" as there is no such thing as free. Everything cost money and yes even your Linux distro costs money to make and maintain. This is the very reason why Linux is un-standardised and for most part unusuable for the average user. I would never use something so pooly made and expect it to run a state asset. Would you buy a german car or a indian car?

 

[killmess]

[citation][nom]apmyhr[/nom][...]You can bitch all day about Vista, but the fact is that it is more secure than XP, is now in SP2, and has been fully tested by the Army's own validation program.[/citation]

The validation program it's to test de compatibility with the programs they use, it doesn't test security.

"The Army Golden Master program is responsible for the release of the Army standard baseline configurations for commonly used computing environments within the Army Enterprise Infrastructure, the team responsible for making sure applications that ran on XP will run on Vista,”