Vista finds a home on 1,300 Canterbury Uni desktops

Canterbury Christ Church University has moved to Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system in time for the new academic year.

The computing services department migrated 1,330 student desktops from XP over the summer following a user testing acceptance programme in May and June.

As part of the migration, the university has also moved to Microsoft's Office 2007 package.

Speaking to silicon.com, head of computing services at the university, Dr Ian Ellery, said: "We want to be a university where students get a state-of-the-art experience. Eighteen to 22-year-olds are very up on what's happening and we have to cater for that."

He added: "Also we are already experiencing software and devices, especially laptops, that are really only designed to run Vista. I think on the hardware side it's getting increasingly difficult to buy a laptop that you can back-convert to XP."

The switch will also mean have a security benefit, according to Ellery. "[Vista]'s more locked down, we can control the desktop better," he added.

The decision to move to Vista this year was also partly inspired by the opening of a high-tech learning centre in 2009, meaning the tech team would have little time to carry out a desktop migration next summer.

"If we didn't do it now, we wouldn't have done it for another year and that for me was too late," Ellery said.

All of the university's student desktops are now running on Vista with the tech team aiming to migrate all staff computers by April next year following a staged rollout. Students will also receive training to help them use the features of the new OS.

Ellery added that although there are obvious benefits of moving to Vista, the case for sticking with XP will become increasingly difficult to justify for organisations.

He said: "A lot of universities will migrate probably for start of term '09 and I think a lot of that is to do with the obsolescence of XP. Microsoft wants us to move and eventually we'll be forced into it."

In April, Forrester Research found that by the end of 2007, just 6.3 per cent of enterprise users were on Vista, although a quarter of the 50,000 business users surveyed said they were planning to make the switch this year.