It is starting to verge on redundant to point out some other agency or company taking a pass on Vista, but Becta, the organization responsible for IT strategy for the UK public school system and other government agencies has produced the clearest, most well-reasoned report on the logic of dismissing Vista and Office 2007 that I have seen yet.

After two years of intensive study, Becta has concluded that Vista adoption simply isn't worthwhile in most instances due to costs and a lack of compelling features. Similarly, they recommend against deploying Office 2007 until its interoperability (particularly with regard to file formats... lack of useful ODF support is prominently mentioned, despite other recent recommendations in support of OOXML) with other products improves. That's a polite way of saying "never" since that almost exactly opposite of where Microsoft would like to take the product. Becta puts the onus back on Microsoft to come up with something compelling to change that equation.

The attractive thing about the Becta study is the amount of time that went into it and the willingness the researchers exhibited to revisit product improvements in the time since it was released. It is an even-handed read and while the conclusions are similar to those reached by more partisan sources, they're inescapable when you consider the data.

Becta has a complaint lodged with the UK Office of Fair Trade over Microsoft's licensing practices, which is disclosed in the report, but licensing plays a relatively small part in the overall consideration (only one-third the Vista upgrade costs cited are attributable to licensing).

If you're considering rolling out Office 2007 or Vista I highly recommend you review the report in your planning stages. Even if you ultimately elect to make the upgrades, the information is invaluable for calculating your ROI and best-case deployment scenarios.