Windows 7 Strategy and Migration Planning

Unlike its predecessors Windows 7 was intended to be more focused and an incremental upgrade to the Windows line: are organisations planning on migrating to Windows 7?

Unlike its predecessor, Windows Vista, which introduced a large number of new features, Windows 7 was intended to be a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows line, with the goal of being fully compatible with the same applications and hardware as Windows Vista.
For organisations considering migrating to Windows 7, especially those still running Windows XP, the clock is ticking.
It can take up to 12-18 months to prepare for a client operating system change. That's a year to a year and a half of application testing, sorting out the problems that tests reveal, and planning. Then there's the migration itself, which, administrators know only too well, can take a significant amount of time in itself.

Despite that, there is a pent-up demand to move to a new operating system with more than 19% of the global IT workforce expected to be using Windows 7 by the end of 2010.

Why? Because many organisations have ageing machines that need refreshing, others see the end of mainstream XP support on the horizon, and the rest are being seduced by the promise of improved mobility, security, networking and search capabilities.

Although any operating system upgrade can be disruptive - it takes time and careful planning, and can deplete IT resources and drain employee productivity if not done correctly - smart organisations are using a mix of technologies, asset management, configuration management and application virtualisation to set themselves up to ensure a successful Windows 7 migration.

Deliberately focused on Windows 7 strategy and migration planning, this workshop, which featured 26 delegates from 17 organisations, allowed participants to explore this topic in more depth and come away with agreed best practice solutions for a successful migration.

This workshop considered the following Windows migration topics:

• Planning
• Dos and Don'ts
• Concurrent migrations
• Hardware issues
• Applications
• Perceptions of Microsoft
• Tools