Thinkpads Forum

Our company has a comparitively large number of mobile laptop users across its 300 or so employees. Until recently, hardware standardization has not happened here, and Im interested to know, having put forward the Lenovo Thinkpads T400 and X200 as the two main 'company standard' laptops, how suitable they would be for such a delivery.

A little background - Predominantly, Sony laptops have been purchased, as well as a smaller mix of Toshiba. As (I feel) Sony are largely driven by the consumer market, it means that there are a whole host of various models and as the product line changes so frequently the amount of unique images built for each device is high in number and very time consuming to manage and support.

One of the main things I need to know is how frequently Lenovo change their product lines. It would seem to me that its far less frequent than Sony, but I need some sort of confirmation on this in order to back it up, and finding such information is proving difficult.

Worst case scenario would be for me to recommend the above two laptops, and for them to be obsolete in the near future, as standardization across the organisation is the objective. If the range is reasonably stable and unlikely to change constantly (as with the Sonys) then chances are we will move to Lenovo.

Thanks for reading and in advance of any help!

I'm surprised nobody has answered you. Though I don't know much, I can say that IBM made it a point to keep their long-lived product lines very service friendly for corporate customers with an eye on lowering total operating costs. I don't know if Lenovo is keeping that up as rigorously, but one would imagine that it's still a leader in the market for business machines.

Certainly they are still investing in their Thinkvantage software utilities which are aimed at business and IT needs. Docks, swappable drive bays, sharing of components across several models over the years and many other business class features offer advantages.

You might try the Lenovo website and forums (?) for more...

Cheers,
Steve

Actually a key point is that even when new models are introduced, you can use standard software images. For example, as I recall, you could have a standard software image that would work on all the X3x and T4x series systems, spanning a number of years of purchasing.

For current info on corporate management of ThinkPads, take a look at this link:
http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/migration/index.html

Many thanks for the replies. Im interested in ImageUltra as a means of building and deploying custom images, currently we use WDS (Windows Deployment Services) to captutre and deploy images to our Vaio laptops, to date there are about 17 images which presents its own difficulties as you can imagine.

You sir, need to call your Lenovo Account manager, and explain the situation. He/She will no doubt beat a path to your door to explain what the product lifecycles are, Lenovo business support, and what volume discounts you might enjoy.

Of course, this is what would happen if you were considering Dell or HP. Lenovo however, does seem to have a low profile when it comes to business customers. A very strange situation considering its IBM past.

Perhaps someone who already enjoys Lenovo business support could step forward and give you their thoughts.