Channel Truths About Vista, Office 2007 And SharePoint Server

It's been a few months since Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 hit the market, and the fanfare has quieted somewhat. With the hoopla behind them, solution providers are getting down to business and figuring out what their customers are looking for and what opportunities the new products provide. Their thinking so far: Office 2007 is in great demand, and SharePoint Server, in particular, is driving new development and integration projects for Microsoft channel partners. But solution providers say their customers are in no hurry to upgrade desktop systems to Vista--and resellers aren't inclined to push them.

Microsoft has said for some time that every $1 spent for Vista licenses will generate $18 in revenue for channel partners, for a total of $70 billion this year--a figure Robert Deshaies, vice president of Microsoft's U.S. Partner Group, recently repeated at CMP Technology's XChange Solution Provider conference in San Diego. But Vista hasn't started ringing the cash registers yet.

"We're not seeing any demand for Vista at all," says J.R. Guthrie, president of Advantage Computers, a Tucson, Ariz.-based solution provider. Sure, he gets the occasional customer inquiry about Vista. "I talk them out of it. It's not ready," he says.

Vista has its shortcomings, including missing drivers for printers and other peripheral devices from some manufacturers and a lack of application support from independent software vendors.

"It doesn't work well for everybody yet," notes Bryan Sensintaffar, vice president at PC Computer & Software, a Tulsa, Okla.-based solution provider.

Last month, for example, Adobe disclosed that it wouldn't issue updates to current versions of its Dreamweaver, InDesign and Photoshop applications to support Vista. Customers will have to wait until new versions of those digital publishing products debut later this spring or in the summer. The company plans to issue a free update to Adobe Acrobat 8 to support Vista by midyear.

VARs say a number of critical antivirus products and VoIP technologies don't work with Vista yet either. Several report that ConnectWise, a professional services automation tool widely used by solution providers to run their own businesses, also doesn't support Vista. (ConnectWise says its Spring 2007 release will support Vista.) One solution provider executive tried to load Vista on his Toshiba laptop and found it didn't support his wireless Internet connectivity apps.

"I don't think there are enough applications out there that are truly ported to Vista to really take advantage of it," says Ken Winell, senior vice president at Pcubed, a New York-based project management services and solutions company. He adds that some 64-bit applications that do run on Vista must do so in 32-bit emulation mode.

NEXT: Vista's real problem, from the perspective of solution providers.