Easing the XP-to-Windows-7 Migration

Despite Microsoft's lack of upgrade support, transitioning from Windows XP to Windows 7 will be easier than you think.

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.
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.

As for the applications, those can be reinstalled manually (the hard way), by using Deployment Kit during Windows 7 install (easier), or through Group Policy assigning or publishing of software (automagically).

Locking down allowable apps
Another Windows 7 feature worth noting is AppLocker, which is also new to Windows Server 2008 R2
Using Group Policy settings can whitelist or blacklist sets of applications that you allow or deny on users' machines. Going well beyond the Software Restriction Policies we have today, AppLocker allows you to define rules based on any number of digital-signature attributes, including publisher, product name, file name, and file version.What impressed me with this feature is that you can create a reference machine with the applications you want users to have and then use that to create the default set of rules you want for your policies, all with a couple of clicks.

Triaging trouble tickets with image capture
Finally, what may be one of the biggest headache-savers is a little tool called Problem Steps Recorder, or PSR, discussed by Mark Minasi and demonstrated by Adam Carter.
We've all received calls from users frantic about having "clicked something" and "it just went poof." OS vernacular seems to slip their mind in times of distress. With PSR, users can record what they are doing on screen. The recorder doesn't make a video, but a simple file with image snapshots of what they clicked and what the screen showed them. In addition, PSR provides a list of what users clicked and did. All of this is put into a zip file that can be e-mailed to you for review.
As I'm sure you can see, PSR is an incredible tool -- if for no other reason than to help your mother set up Windows 7 as soon as it goes on the shelves, as I plan to. Oh, and as for file size, the one PSR archive I saw created came in at half a megabyte zipped.
These are just a few of the worthwhile Windows 7 tools I have seen at this year's Windows Connections. For those holding out for Windows 7, it will be worth the wait.
As for the rest of Windows Connections, expect to see more tidbits about Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange, virtualization, ESX vs. Hyper-V, and SharePoint in this blog in the coming weeks.


By  J. Peter Bruzzese
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