It's been almost six months since Microsoft released Windows Vista to general public and computer manufacturers also have started shipping computers pre-installed with Windows Vista. Although the Windows Vista adoption rates have been pretty slow, I am seeing more and more machines with Windows Vista pre-installed have started popping up all over (including yours truly, who has bought a Vista installed laptop as a gift. I am a Linux user myself).

Businesses traditionally have been the slowest to adopt any new technology especially if it is from Microsoft. I was reading one article on Computerworld written by respected columnist Frank Hayes about the inevitability of the story that whether you like it or not, Windows Vista is going to come in your enterprise and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I tried searching for it so I could give a link, but unfortunately I couldn't.

Especially at a company where I am working. Here we have more contractors than employees (including me) and the contractors are expected to get their own laptops to work. So realistically speaking, we as IT department for my current employer have no control over what kinds of software comes in our environment. Just yesterday I came across my first issue with Windows Vista. We provide Microsoft certificate based wireless access to employees and contractors. The certificate web service in Windows Server 2003 relies on an ActiveX control called Xenroll. Microsoft has deprecated Xenroll in Windows Vista so no matter how hard you try, it is not going to work and the certificate installation process invariably gets stuck at Downloading ActiveX Control window.

I searched for this on the Internet and came up with this knowledge base article published by Microsoft which addresses this particular issue. A cursory glance at the article tells me that it is going to be a major project for us, if we have to continue providing wireless access to our users who have moved over to Windows Vista. To allow certificate enrollment web pages on Windows Vista based clients in our current setup we have to use Windows Server Longhorn based web pages. Time to roll our sleeves, pull up our socks and get down to work.