I finally managed to download the latest BETA of Microsoft Windows 7.

After installing it and playing with it for about an hour my initial impressions can be summed up with one occasionally overused interjection.

Wow.

Just plain wow.

Any shortcomings customers found with Vista have been addressed with Windows 7 and then some.

One feature customers will find useful is the problem step recorder or the PSR. The PSR is a great piece of technology that when launched, records the user's step by step interaction with a program. For example, if I am using the browser and a particular Web page is causing the browser to fail, the PSR will record the screen and capture my input. The PSR will then package all the recordings up to be sent to an administrator.

What the administrator gets is a package containing a HTML slide show of my actions complete with an English language description of what I did to cause the failure.

Most customer support issues are usually small in nature and having the PSR send error reports to software vendors will greatly reduce downtime when dealing with a program that is having issues. The PSR allows 3rd party vendors to respond quickly without having to go back and forth on the phone with the end user.

The next feature of Windows 7 that I am excited about is the hibernate feature. This version of the hibernate technology is, quite literally, as instant as Microsoft promised it would be. My laptop never gets shutdown or rebooted. I am an avid user of the hibernate feature in Vista and occasionally, the wake up and hibernate times (given the amount of programs I run simultaneously) are horridly slow. On Windows 7, I hit the hibernate button, and the machine is instantly off. On wake up, the longest I waited was 3 seconds.

Like it or not, Windows 7 is coming and if users didn't beg and plead for Vista in their corporate environment, they will for Windows 7.

At our upcoming Micro Focus World event on May 11-13 2009, we will be holding a dedicated session to demonstrate what our plans are for Windows 7 and how to best move our customer's desktop assets, including Micro Focus RUMBA from 2000/XP/Vista into Windows 7.

At this session, we will be holding a panel discussion with customers who have made and are thinking about making wholesale desktop migrations from older versions of Windows to newer ones.

Come to this session to hear best practices, tips on what to avoid, how to make sure your RUMBA users are migrated properly, and overall strategies for keeping the user community happy and productive while investing in the latest Microsoft technologies.