Recommendations

 
 
By Christine Ewing  |  Posted 2011-03-04 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Recommendations

Any company looking to migrate to Windows 7 wants the migration to be successful-while minimizing costs, making the process as easy as possible and reducing the amount of work that needs to be done after the upgrade. Survey respondents recommended some steps to help achieve a successful migration. Planning, training and pilot tests were three that were most mentioned.

"The only advice I could give is to have users go through a tutorial," one IT director of a small communications business stated. "Once they've learned the system and are up to speed, they're going to be extremely pleased. They'll overcome their initial concern very quickly."

With regard to pilot testing, another IT director (this time of a midsize Aerospace enterprise) recommended, "Before migrating, everyone should test their applications and do as much pretesting and application testing as you possibly can. After you successfully test those applications, do a small pilot. Do a small rollout to make sure that there isn't something you missed."

Many survey respondents indicated that they used the operating system migration to implement or upgrade technologies such as standardization, virtual desktop interface (VDI) and security:

"Upgrading security was the first thing we decided to do because we had issues in the past," said one IT manager. "This time we figured we'd nip it in the bud since we're moving to Windows 7. Then, we just carried that through for all our migrations."

Another issue faced by companies as they upgrade their operating system is incompatible applications. It was found that 71 percent of survey respondents simply replaced those applications and 69 percent found it effective to use application virtualization or other solutions.



 
 
 
 
Christine Ewing is Director of Product Marketing for the Endpoint Management group at Symantec. Christine has more than 12 years of experience in IT software product management and marketing. In her role at Symantec, Christine is responsible for identifying and analyzing market trends and working with the product management team to create market-driven products. In addition to being a seasoned product marketing manager, Christine has held a number of product management roles inside of Symantec, where she delivered new technologies to the market and managed existing endpoint management products. Prior to her current role in marketing, Christine was a senior product manager for the Endpoint Management group at Symantec and at Altiris (before it was acquired by Symantec in 2007). Before joining Symantec/Altiris, Christine held positions at Compaq and Thermo Electron, working in various roles of engineering, product management and marketing. Christine holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and History from Northwestern University. She can be reached at christine_ewing@symantec.com.
 
 
 
 
 
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