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Windows Vista Springboard: Discover

I posted a few weeks ago about some Vista Springboard. Continuing that series of posts, I wanted to talk about the first part of Springboard program which is: Discover. Now I'm sure many of you have already "Discovered" Vista, I thought I had too, but the great thing about the springboard site is it concentrates a great deal of information into nice digestible categories.

So as most readers have probably already discovered the technical aspects of Vista, I wanted to highlight some of the great tools that are provided. If you have ever been asked to deliver a report on how much is something is going to cost, and to figure out its ROI, and TCO, and all those non technical acronyms that our favourite accountant is concerned with, If your like me your eyes gloss over, and your brain starts hurting.

Fortunately Microsoft know's that we're all lazy admins, so they made us a great tool: Microsoft Windows Vista Cost and Benefit Estimator.

First the calculator starts out by asking some simple questions. For instance how many computers do you have in environment. Then what the current OS distributions are.

Once you have entered in your information a highly detailed report will be generated that also includes a laundry list of benefits. These are the kinds of numbers that impress decision makers, and that can take hours to generate. Now a big Disclaimer that most of the data is generated based on the information you enter in to the tool. This means you need to be confident in the information so that the report generated is going to accurate.

example of benefits:

So take a look at the tool: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/ROItool/Default.aspx

And don't forget to discuss your Vista deployment issues in the Forums. To encourage some lively discussions, the best posts, answers and contributions (as decided by a qualified panel of qualified judges, err.. Lazy judges) will receive a copy of Windows Vista SP1, You have to post to win!