Hornbill has today announced that its award-winning Enterprise Support Platform, Supportworks, is ready for Microsoft’s new operating system Windows Vista, as well as being compatible with Internet Explorer® 7, and is ready for customer roll-out. According to Microsoft, Windows Vista will be made available to Volume License customers later in the month of November 2006. Hornbill has carried out compatibility validation with the Beta 2 version of Vista to ensure there are no issues utilising Vista theming to provide the same look and feel to end users.

By ensuring that Supportworks is Vista ready, Hornbill is enabling its customers to fully benefit from the many improvements in Vista, which include enhanced security features and a new version of Internet Explorer that allows tabbed browsing and adds anti-phishing/anti-spoofing features. New security features within Vista allow end-users to do more without the need to be logged in with powerful Administrator privileges. Maintaining this type of user privilege information is an important part of any IT Service Desk operation and will be made easier using Vista.

Vista also helps IT staff to ensure that employees, particularly those that work off-site, keep up to date with security patches. Employees that do not keep up to date can be barred from accessing the network. Again, a security issue high on the agenda for most IT Service Desks.

Gerry Sweeney, Managing Director at Hornbill Systems explained, “Unlike many products that have a tightly coupled dependency with the operating system and other runtime components, Supportworks is designed to be as independent of the operating system as possible, so when a newer version of the OS is released this generally does not present a problem for us. Apart from one issue we found during testing with IE7 compatibility, Supportworks performed flawlessly on the new operating system with no changes needed. This further validates our development strategy which means that our customers can be confident Supportworks will run from the outset with no glitches due to a new operating system, enabling them to migrate to the newer, more security conscious Windows Vista.”

Supportworks 7.2.1 which works with Windows Vista is available from December 06 and as usual is a free upgrade for all maintained customers.