Easing the XP-to-Windows-7 Migration

InfoWorld — This week's Windows Connections Conference in Orlando has offered a wealth of information, but some of the most worthwhile insights have come outside the official sessions, in conversations with IT pros about their strategies and concerns around Windows.

One such discussion I had over coffee involved two Windows admins, one from Denver who maintains 2,000 users, and one who maintains 5,000 students in Buffalo, N.Y. When I asked them whether they had or intended to deploy Vista, both shook their heads and said, "We'll wait for Windows 7 ... maybe."

That seemed to be the approach many in attendance were taking: no to Vista and cautious on Windows 7. In fact, the session about moving from XP to Windows 7 was reasonably full.

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Microsoft technovangelist Adam "the Bomb" Carter, who you may know from the TechNet Edge video site, led the session, which left me with three key takeaway items to ease some of the anxieties you might have about transitioning from XP to Windows 7 when its RTM arrives.

User state migration made easy
You may recall a little back-and-forth debate my colleague Randall Kennedy and I undertook recently regarding the lack of XP-to-7 upgrade support. In his blog, Kennedy argued that "Microsoft needs to provide an in-place XP upgrade mechanism in Windows 7, if for no other reason than to demonstrate contrition for its myriad Vista sins." My retort was that (a) most IT pros don't perform an in-place upgrade of enterprise systems and (b) Microsoft provides excellent tools in the Windows Deployment Kit -- the User State Migration Tool, for example -- that will make the process a breeze.

I must confess I went out on a limb with that second point. Yes, Microsoft has done fine things with deployment tools, but I had yet to see actual proof that Microsoft would in fact be up to the task in this case. That is, until this week, when Adam Carter demonstrated the migration of an XP system with 12GB of personal data to Windows 7 using Windows Deployment Tools, taking the XP system's personal settings with it.

Windows Deployment Tools copies everything to a folder on the drive, which isn't swiped afterward if you don't want it to be, and then installs a fresh Windows 7, restoring the settings and documents. The whole process took about 30 minutes after answering a few simple dialog box questions about the OS installation -- name of the computer, domain or workgroup, and so forth.

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