Vista’s Beta Users Praise System’s Security

With Microsoft getting ready to ship its new Vista operating system, experts who have been evaluating it for use within corporations are praising its security enhancements while fretting about the finer points of implementation.

Five years in development, Vista is supposed to ship to enterprise customers by the end of this month, two months ahead of its general release to consumers. Microsoft declared the Vista code complete this week, releasing it to manufacturing along with Office 2007.

For more on this topic, see Vista Adoption: Can Microsoft Beat the ‘Eye Candy’ Rap?

“It’s certainly the most secure operating system they’ve released to date,” said Erik Schmidt, a technical manager at the University of Florida, which has been evaluating Vista on more than 50 personal computers as one of the formal beta testers in Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program.

That perspective was echoed by another TAP participant, Keith Dickey, a project manager in Fulton County, Georgia. Dickey said that a new feature within Vista called user account control&#151which administrators can turn on to prevent the installation of unauthorized applications&#151will allow the county to cut back on the 24,000 hours it spends each year cleaning up infected machines. That will translate into about $750,000 that the county’s chief information officer, Robert Taylor, can devote to something else.

Some of the new Microsoft security enhancements may be complicated to use.

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