Avoiding Migration Mishaps

Brian Casselman, Systems Engineer

I recently came across a conversation on LinkedIn surrounding tips and experience with Windows 7 migration. With so many organizations in the process of making this move, or planning to do so in 2011, it’s a very relevant and important discussion that I’d like to share my thoughts on.

The challenge with user migration for a lot of my customers has been how much energy and effort they want to put into migrating data vs. personality. Data is a no-brainer. This must be moved, or you may be faced with an uprising from the staff. Personality is a whole other topic. How much of the user’s personality is critical to productivity? This can be very significant if your users are spending several hours, or even several days after the migration setting up all their applications so that they are “personal” again. To put this into perspective, think about losing your laptop/desktop after you have spent three years customizing all the behaviors of that machine to conform to you and your workflow. It is a pain to rebuild a new machine to meet the standards you have become accustomed to. The users suffer that same experience during a typical migration.

In most cases, data is stored on the network so data migration is generally not a concern. But sometimes data does exist on the local machine such as your laptop or desktop. This is data that may or may not be accounted for during a migration. The Windows User State Migration Tool (USMT) can be a valuable tool for migrating some or all of the data and even the personality, which is basically what is contained in the profile (my docs, pics, app data, HKCU, etc). The tricky part is to decide WHAT you want to move or migrate. Do you want to move all the data from the local machine and place it onto central storage? This could include music and video files or other non-company related data that can consume valuable storage on the company resources.

The “profile” of the user will be moved automatically as a part of the process, so users can expect a similar look and feel to the applications on the new system. But the fact is, in order to use the USMT, you will need to “touch” all those machines in some fashion to get that data off the PC. Depending on your environment, that could result in a lot of administrative overhead.

The key is to avoid going through this process every time you change the infrastructure, while at the same time allowing users the flexibility to gain access to resources from any device on your network without suffering the diverse personalities they could encounter on different systems. For example, if users are accessing resources from a Windows 7 computer on the network and then transition to a Windows Server 2008 running Terminal Services for remote access, they should not have to maintain two different “profiles” which includes their personality. This would incorporate items like Internet Explorer Favorites, spell-check settings in Word, backgrounds on the desktop, etc. These settings should be available to the user on every one of those systems, and be consistent between systems. The bottom line is, users should be independent of the operating system and the profile tied to the operating system and should be able to access corporate resources on any system that IT delivers to them. Each system should not look or feel any different than any other system on the network.

From the machine side of things, a tool such as Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) coupled with automation software is the key to delivering a consistent environment. Too many of my customers still do many tasks manually and they write down processes and procedures in notebooks that eventually get misplaced or lost. When you use something like SCCM you gain the benefit of standardization of process and consistent delivery of software and settings.

What is the solution? There are many MS partners out there that offer a variety of solutions outside the MS toolbox. We are one of those companies. We have addressed all of these issues mentioned above with the RES Dynamic Desktop Studio . It can handle simple tasks like migrating user data or more advanced concepts such as building a Windows 7 machine to creating and managing user accounts in Active Directory. This extends to managing the location of user data so future migrations are not complex, thus reducing your time to implement production. Dynamic Desktop Studio decouples users from the operating System and the dependency on profiles. Users can access resources from any location or device and IT is able to change the infrastructure to keep up with the latest and greatest technology while not impacting user productivity.

At the end of the day, change is inevitable. Users simply do not want to see changes impact the personality of their computers. At RES Software, we allow you to change your infrastructure without it being detrimental to your user’s productivity.