7.1 RELIABLE?
You are right, must see before rejecting. It is also difficult to predict what's happen, when we switch from 10 clients LAB, to 5'000 clients live... And DS 7.1 seems to be risk for now. Any way, sure will go better and better, and be the future, in 1 or 2 years perhaps? I thanks Symantec for keeping both version "living", and no EOL yet for 6.9.
INVENTORY?
For DS only licensed customers only, moving from DS 6.9 to 7.1 just means loosing inventory. For sure, Inventory for CMS customers is a LOT, LOT more than the basic Device+Software enumeration from Windows registry, DS 6.9 is providing. But switching to DS 7.1 only, just remove any inventory at all, except list of services, that is part of the free NS agent.
OSD future?
Currently, I got a few customers wondering if they should not go to OSD with Microsoft instead. One of the reason is the delay from Symantec for being able to support latest Microsoft OS. We wait a while for getting the Win7 x64 support. But the main reason is the missing support for WinPE 3, just a shame as seems it works using some tricks for DS 6.9... Who want to manage both Vista (WinPE2) + Win7 (WinPE3) criticals drivers (Net+Disk), without any Vista client in production ??? As we can cut this by 2, using a WinPE 3...