Like I said in a previous post, I recently attended the launch of Windows Vista here in Canada. Microsoft showed off some new features of Vista, some of which have some very serious potential.

While some have criticized some of the new features of Windows Vista (like its many options for turning off your PC), Vista offers some improvements while not really feeling like it’s making any great leaps forward.

While the shiny new graphical interface is certainly an improvement over Windows XP’s interface, is it really worth upgrading to the new version of Windows?

The answer is yes — but not yet.

Having used Windows Vista in its current state, it feels very unfinished. There are small bugs and crashes that seem to happen spontaneously, making it still feel like it’s at the beta stage. So I wouldn’t reccommend going out at purchasing a copy at the moment (this would only apply to business users, as Vista has not been released to the home consumer market yet).

There are however, some great features within Vista that will certainly make it worth the upgrade eventually.

Document version history.

This is by far my favorite feature that has been included in the new version of Windows.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a great deal of time working with different versions of documents. I name them things like ‘Prototype v0.1a’ and ‘Prototype v0.21b’. And very often, I end up saving over or deleting a previous version of one of those versions and scrambling to find an older copy of it.

Windows Vista has a built-in function that will restore previous versions of documents. For anyone who works with multiple iterations of documents, this can prove extremely useful.

Remember that this is built into Vista, and not Office, so it’s not necessarily a reason to upgrade to Office 2007, but perhaps one reason to upgrade to Vista.

Integration with Office 2007, as good as it sounds?

Microsoft has went ahead and made forms and workflows easier to do in Office 2007. This is great news for corporations with complex, threaded workflows. But does it really make much sense if you’re a smaller user?

Office 2007 has also made some advancements in terms of opting to use open standards, but this will also not be of too much concern to a small business or non-profit user.

Office 2007’s ribbon menu is a great improvement, but free’s still better.

While the ribbon is an excellent idea for a user interface, OpenOffice still makes much more sense for a smaller organization with a limited budget.

The scourge of compability.

While there are fixes and workarounds available to be able to view Office 2007’s new formats within older versions of Office, this going to be a problem for early adopters of the new software.

Bob Bushway points out that most people should just save their documents in the older Office 2003 formats anyway, which makes you wonder what the point of upgrading to Office 2007 now is.

One final editorial point about Windows Vista: the security pop-up boxes. It’s very annoying, and like Michael states in this post, it doesn’t really improve security. If I’m determined to run a malicious program, I’m going to blindly click through anything that asks me if I really want to do it.

I’m not sure how this extra pop-up is really a security enhancement.