IT Announcement
CSUN Microsoft Vista Enterprise Project Team
Microsoft Vista Enterprise Review Process
Project teams comprised of Information Technology staff and a subset of the Desktop Administration and Support Committee reviewed Vista Enterprise with Service Pack 1 for its new features and compatibility with campus software, and with Active Directory. The team also suggested hardware and software recommendations to ensure your computer runs well.
Notable Vista Features
Users that upgrade to Vista will not experience nearly the culture shock as they would from going to Office 2007 from Office 2003. Although Vista’s interface differs from that of XP’s, Microsoft did a decent job maintaining XP’s overall functionality while providing many user–intuitive enhancements.
Based on message board feedback from Vista users worldwide and the experiences of CSUN’s Vista review team, the following features are notable improvements over their counterpart XP features.
Instant Search: Notably one of Vista’s most useful enhancements, the Instant Search feature provides users with easier access to software and files with a few simple clicks of the keyboard.
Flip3D: Offers a mini graphical snapshot of each of the open applications. This is an improvement over the text–based Alt–Tab feature in XP.
Taskbar Thumbnails: When hovering over the task bar, each minimized program will be graphically presented in miniature. XP provides a text–based description rather than a graphical one.
BitLocker Hard Drive Encryption: Using “Trusted Platform Module” technology, BitLocker encrypts the contents of your hard drive to prevent tampering of ill–seized data by anyone other than the account holder. This is most useful in cases of improperly decommissioned computers, or computers that are lost or stolen. Although BitLocker is not available in XP, equivalent third party software programs such as TrueCrypt are available.
Bi–Directional Firewall: A bi–directional firewall protects a computer from not only inbound threats, but also from outbound threats initiated from the PC. By default, only the inbound portion of the Vista firewall is enabled. To use the outbound firewall, users must manually modify outbound firewall rules; which is complex and unintuitive.
System Image Back–up: Automatically back–up and restore the entire computer hard disk drive from DVD or a network file store location. This is arguably one of the nicer features available in Vista.
Vista is Compatible with Standard CSUN Software
Common CSUN software applications such as Microsoft Office 2007, Symantec Anti–virus Corporate Edition 10.2, and Cisco VPN 5.0 are confirmed to be compatible with Vista. For a complete list of tested software see the Vista CSUN Project Team test results.Vista is Compatible with CSUN Active Directory Policies
Two separate sets of tests were run to confirm that Vista computers can safely integrate with the campus’ desktop authentication/administration system, Active Directory. The first test consisted of joining a number of Vista test computers to the campus’ test Active Directory system and confirming that user access behaved as expected. The second test consisted of restricting desktop settings using a number of campus–level Group Policy Object settings; both tests were successful.
Project Team Members
IT
Carlos Rodriguez – Desktop Support
Chris Sales – User Support Services
Kimberley Heraux – Project Management Office
Linda Llanes – User Support Services – Training
Nicola Sandoli – Project Management Office
Ranjit Philip – Networking
Ron Heeb – Application Development
Sylvia Barnes – Information Security Office
Yaw Kusiappiah – Active Directory
DASC
Anthony Nguyen – Roland Tseng College of Education
Caleb Fahey – College of Arts Media and Communication
Claudia Garcia – College of Business
Felicia Morariu – Academic Resources
Glenn Alejandro – Student Affairs
Michael McFarland – Library
Stephanie Nguyen – College of Humanities
Questions or Feedback
If you have questions about the Vista review project contact the Project Director, Chris Olsen at chris.olsen@csun.edu.