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General Information
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November 20, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 28
Page(s) 40 in print issue
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Windows 7 Migration
What Enterprises Should Be Doing Now
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| Key Points
• Enterprises should begin testing Windows 7 now in a lab environment, even if wide-scale deployment is more than a year away.
• Legacy hardware could pose some problems, so buying Windows 7 preinstalled is often recommended.
• Determine which vendor applications will support Windows 7 and prepare to phase out those that will not. | | Windows 7 is now commercially available, but according to analyst firm Gartner, few enterprises will begin full-scale deployment of the operating system before late next year. Still, for upcoming workstation replacement cycles, the majority of firms will forgo Vista and adopt Win7 instead, according to Gartner. Indeed, most enterprises will eventually adopt the new OS because of its improvements, especially when compared to Vista.
“It’s clear that Windows 7 is a lot better than Vista and even than XP,” says Roger Kay, founder and president of the analyst firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. “Most of what I’ve been hearing is that things that worked on XP and [were] broken on Vista are working again on 7.”
So for upcoming workstation replacement cycles, your enterprise will almost inevitably invest in Win7 at some point. The issue is to determine when that will be. How to prepare your enterprise for the switch is of utmost concern.
 Take It To The Lab
Although the vast majority of enterprises will not implement Win7 on a wide-scale basis before the end of next year, it is a good idea for IT departments to begin evaluating how the OS could meet their business needs in the near future and to start testing it.
“Customers [should] begin to do serious work on assessing their applications [and] identifying applications that need to be replaced with newer versions and applications that will require some form of remediation,” says Patricia M. Wilkey, director of global desktop and mobility for HP Enterprise Services (www.hp.com). “We fully expect customers to also look at applications not only from a compatibility with Windows 7 point of view, but also identifying applications that are good candidates for application virtualization and presentation virtualization.”
At Shands HealthCare in Florida, for example, Brad Kowal, assistant data center director, says his staff has begun testing applications on Win7 machines in a lab environment and that his enterprise’s evaluation period could take up to a year. “So you have to be prepared to pull the trigger, and you really need to have it tested,” Kowal says.
The Hardware Challenge
For new hardware, there will be a lot of pressure to allow the OS into the enterprise’s IT infrastructure during the coming months, says Robert Enderle, an analyst for Enderle Group. “This suggests bringing in some Win7 test platforms and putting them into limited production environments to see how they do and whether they will cause unacceptable problems,” Enderle says. “Then form [a] short-term policy based on these experiences.”
Enderle says custom workstations or purpose-built platforms will likely pose the most compatibility challenges. Highly customized hardware “is typically slow to be embraced, and it may be eventually better to replace the [existing OS] than to upgrade it depending on how custom it is and whether resources to rewrite any non-compliant custom drivers are available,” Enderle says.
“New hardware is the preferred method of deployment, followed by clean installations. Inline upgrades only work well with Vista PCs, and since there are few of these in enterprises and problems tend to transfer along with the core code anyway, I’m recommending clean installations across the board when possible.”
Application Issues
One central issue is the need to determine whether applications your enterprise uses will be compatible with Win7. Some software vendors, for example, may be in the process of phasing out products that run only on Windows XP, so Win7 will require replacement applications in those cases.
“A lot has to do with seeing the end of the road coming for XP applications, which we will obviously no longer be able to run when the vendor no longer supports it,” says Shands HealthCare’s Kowal.
When migrating from WinXP, HP’s Wilkey says, enterprises need to have a migration plan by March 2010 for the switchover to be completed prior to Microsoft’s 2014 end-of-XP-support date. “For enterprises that have not maintained their application portfolio or updated their desktop management infrastructure since deploying Windows XP, this effort could be significant, and consideration should be given to retaining expertise to manage the effort,” Wilkey says.
The good news is that the majority of applications that are compatible with Windows Vista will run without too much trouble on Win7, but work will still need to be done to get Vista applications ready, says Wilkey. “There may be minor upgrades to application distribution and desktop management systems to take advantage of all the Windows 7 features that will need to be deployed,” Wilkey says. “But these upgrades typically are minor releases instead of the required major release to move from Windows XP to Windows Vista.”
In many enterprises, different departments often run significantly different application suites and will thus pose separate compatibility issues for Win7. In the case of Shands HealthCare, for example, Kowal says the finance, radiology, pharmacy, and other departments run very different applications and have their own budget constraints.
“Every department has its capital budgets set. So it is imperative to understand the Windows 7 timeline and to understand your application vendor’s compatibility and their timelines,” Kowal says. “Then, you have your normal bandwidth for being able to deploy new PCs and to perform upgrades. You have to take that all into account and look for your weak spots.”
When the day comes to implement Win7, HP’s Wilkey recommends first installing Win7 on workstations along with Windows 2008 R2 on servers and then to use that project as a model. “Using the newly gained modular project skill, focus on smaller spin-off projects to update the infrastructure changes required, such as group policies,” Wilkey says. “IT administrators should not try to create one large mondo project that has everything including the kitchen sink in it. The project cost will escalate, and it [will] never finish, so IT will be looked at again as they just cannot manage the change successfully.” 
by Bruce Gain
Preparing Users
Your enterprise’s users will, of course, directly interact with Windows 7 on a daily basis, so getting them ready should be part of the overall migration process. Some of the applications that will likely be bundled with the new operating system will even require training sessions, says Patricia M. Wilkey, director of global desktop and mobility for HP Enterprise Services (www.hp.com). “Office 2007/2010, which is not part of the operating system but will be seen as part of the upgrade, really does confound users initially,” Wilkey says. “There are also many new features of the OS you can tell [users] about in 15 minutes to make them more productive.” |
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