With 177 million copies ofWindows 7 expected to be shipped by the end of 2010,
according to UDC, businesses need a migration plan.
Indian offshore IT services provider HCL Technologies has
launched a migration service called XpressMigrate. Maninder Singh,
head of end-user computing services in the company's Infrastructure
Services Division, outlines best practices for businesses at the
migration preparation and development stages.
Preparation
- Form a project committee that includes members from each major
business unit, as well as operational groups in the IT
organisation, to oversee the development of a project timeline that
features high-level milestones and estimates required
resources.
- Establish a formal, comprehensive and workable testing
methodology to ensure that issues are identified and categorised,
keeping your environment's variability in mind.
- Explore a migration model that ensures low business risk and
promises assurance tolerance to loss of data through a robust user
state back-up and restoration process for user data and
settings.
Deployment
- Create a platform for visibility into the reports on number of
deployments completed, failed deployments and status of opened
tickets, status view of top three current active deployments, time
taken for deployments, and upcoming schedule for deployments,
etc.
- Use your Windows migration as an opportunity to improve your PC
manageability.
- Plan on piloting for a minimum of three months. The shorter the
pilot, the more problems will occur during the
deployment.