Over the next one to two years, we’re going to need to migrate a couple of thousand people from their XP desktops to Windows 7.
Getting the new desktops setup is easy enough with our imaging process, but the profiles are less clear-cut. Microsoft’s Easy Transfer seems to only bring across the micorosft related stuff while ignoring Firefox, Thunderbird, PuTTY, etc.
I’ve looked a little bit at User State Migration, and we may end up going down that road, but before doing so, I wanted to see what 3rd party products are out there, and what people’s experiences have been with these products.
Thanks very much for any information or experiences you can provide.
Thunderbird if it’s like Firefox should be almost as easy. It’ll have a folder in the application data folder in the user profile. Copy it over to the folder in win7 named roaming under appdata in the user profile.
Thanks for the suggestions. I know about the file structures for Firefox and Mozilla, but am wondering if there are more automated tools that will capture these settings as part of a larger operation. It’s looking like there isn’t much in the way of 3rd party stuff, so it’s probably going to be USMT with customized XML files, and I’m pretty sure that MozBackup will probably be used at least in some instances as well.
I’m interested for this, myself. If there’s any way to copy the various Office bits over, that’d be fantastic: people get amazingly ticked off when the… er, predictive address bit of Outlook vanishes and they have to look up all the email addresses again.
Well, I work for JPMC’s technical support team. We’re going from XP to W7 next month. We just reimage all the computers (roughly 100,000 of them nation wide) from scratch. Each branch has a local server, so they hold the 17.5GB image and roll them out when we press the “red button”.
Of course, that only works when you have the user accounts set up to solely save on a network share. I’m not involved with user account control, so I can’t really tell you what migration issues/solutions there are.
We are currently doing an eval of Systems Center Configuration Manager for this purpose. It basically packages up the “free” microsoft tools - the USMT and the Deployment Toolkit.
There was a nice session at teched on doing this for free that may still be out on the teched web site.
Where I work it’s cheaper to replace the PC. Basic Dells are under $700 on state contract. If you cost out the cost of a tech formatting the drive and install Win7 it’s just not worth it on a pc more than 3 years old. For one thing, none of our pc’s have 2 gig of memory. You only need 512Meg for XP. Some of our PC’s have a Gig of memory. Still, we’d have to upgrade memory on every computer we own. The graphics on the older pc’s isn’t up to par for Win7 either.
We’ll buy new replacement PC’s with Win7 as the older ones become obsolete. Within 4 years they’ll all be humming along on Microsofts latest piece of crap.
Yes, we’re replacing the PCs here, but they still save files and settings locally. 12+ locations, after all. There’s a backup, but we have enough people that restoring all of them is a bit of a PITA. So generally, last time, XP to XP, we used USMT and a printer copy tool, to copy people onto a flash drive, put new computer in, restore people from flash drive, everything looks the same, everyone’s happy.
From what I’ve been reading about USMT so far, the printer settings aren’t moved over. As for the tools to use, from what I’ve gathered so far, SCCM and USMT seem to be the most promising solutions. USMT will do some third party apps, but not Thunderbird. Mostly we’re on IMAP, so that’s not as huge as it could be. Some scripting along with MozBackup may take care of that pretty easily.
When I was setting up a backup/restore setup for my place I used USMT for files and settings but used Printmig.exe for the printers. It was easy to set up and worked great.
Not we don’t need to do the printers as we have set up GPO’s that add the correct printers to people based on thier IP range.
I so love GPOs. Where I work has 6 different legacy ADs that aren’t setup to even trust each other, (nope, no turf paranoia here!), but we’re slowly moving everyone to a single AD. Someday, someday…
