Two weeks ago I went off to a Microsoft event in Reading: “Ready for a New Day: Microsoft’s Launch of Exchange, Office and Vista”. That was quite interesting, and I came away thinking that there are enough useful features to justify an upgrade. They gave me a freebie copy of Windows Vista and Office 2007 for attending; that’s quite a nice touch, especially since the event itself was free. Now that I’ve been doing some presenting myself, I could sympathise with the people at the front when their demos didn’t quite work properly, and I particularly liked the heartfelt cry of “Thank you, demo gods!” when something went smoothly.
Speaking of Vista, I recently received an email from Microsoft, offering me a place on a beta certification exam. I passed the MCDST exams for Windows XP a couple of years ago and Microsoft are now preparing the equivalent MCITP qualification for Windows Vista. The idea of the beta exam is that they can get an idea of whether the questions are too easy/difficult by trying them out on people with a (roughly) known skill level. Anyway, I’m flattered to be invited, and it’s a free exam, so I’ve signed up for that on 5th January. The only snag is that there aren’t any study guides etc. available yet (the people who write them will probably be doing the beta exams too), so I’ll need to prepare for it on my own. Still, I’ve passed all my previous Microsoft exams on my first attempt (8 so far), so I’m quietly confident about this one.
Vista won’t be available as a retail product until January 27th, and Microsoft haven’t sent out any DVDs to business customers yet, but companies with volume licencing deals can download it. I’ve been playing with it on my home machine, so that I can get a feel for it before I do any big deployments at work; here are my thoughts so far.