Vista Explorer

This is article 2 of my Vista Blogs. I have spent some time looking at, and working with, Vista, and have separated various new features into several different articles.

In this article I am going to talk about the additional features in the Explorer window.

Windows explorer

It is now possible to not only see an icon for a document, but also preview the actual document contents.

Users can then highlight a document, see the document text and even copy and paste from that document, all without actually opening it!

There is a lot more information presented in these windows now as well, including links to edit the document, as well as all the property information, without having to right click the file and open a separate Properties window.

It is also possible to right click a file and view a list of the previous file versions, very handy if you need to go back to an earlier version!

Fig 1. Explorer with the preview pane and property information in view.

Kirsty Lowe

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

Have you looked at the recent IDC report that talks about the IT investment and spend to get to Vista?

Customers need to know that a significant investment is involved and have to question whether the upgrade is giving them significantly more than they could have got from existing free or low cost services.

Ugrades are notorious for delivering poor payback so why suck money from innovation when substantially the same experience could be achieved more economically?

[Stuart Allsopp]

Many thanks for your response Dennis.

I think it is up to individual IT managers to weigh up the benefits of Vista against the cost to deploy, including hardware upgrades. I'm sure ROI proposals are being compiled and studied closely by businesses across the UK as we speak. It's fair to say that the typical offering from hardware vendors today is more than capable of deploying Vista, and as with XP it will become the defacto operating system for business PCs in the UK. This may not be the compelling event that is perhaps dreamed of by Microsoft, but it is absolutely clear that it is an inevitable event we all need to plan for.

[Dennis Howlett]

I've now seen reports indicating that M$ expects Vista to be the full employment charter for VARs over the next 5 years. They're talking $13 per $1 on Vista for hardware, support, services etc. That's just plain nuts given I can do everything Vista offers now for...$0.

And how is this going to compete with the coming online services that don't depend on any particular OS or browser? I just don't see it. Sorry.