Last week, I went to Microsoft's UK head office in Reading for the launch of Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Vista. I was impressed with what I saw. When I went in I felt that we would eventually roll Vista out to our users, but not any time soon.

After the launch, I had changed my mind. It not only looks good, but it had some features that look like they will be worth moving ahead with faster than I thought. I haven't installed it yet on my machine, that is a Christmas project.

The aspects I liked were:

The new Group Policy options, especially USB device control.

The GUI looked good. In fact, some of the demos were done via XP and it looked so old.

The imaging technology also looked good. It looks like making images to roll out to machines will be much easier and we won't need third party tools anymore.

The help feature looked brilliant and you can even record your own to help your users.

As I say, I haven't tried any of this as yet, but it looked good in the demos. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I will be blogging more as I try all this out.