Ease those throbbing migration headaches

Looks like PC sales are projected to increase this year, at least according to market watchers, including IDC. That's a little mystifying to me, considering that Redmond isn't releasing a new OS anytime soon. But I suppose a slew of new processors, hotter graphics cards, and PCI Express  are enough to lure a number of performance-hungry folk. Not to mention the continuing epic of 64 bits and the ecstasy of networked Doom 3 after 5:00.

Cut to the poor IT worker. Suddenly, we're forced to stop scouring the Web for quality mail-order brides in order to manage a gaggle of users looking to move all their idiosyncrasies from one machine to another -- a Moorcockian epic to achieve a sane balance between law and chaos. In the old days, this would have been a backbreaking chore combining sneakernet with overtime, Advil, caffeine, divorce, and eventual heart-burst.

But the new Microsoft hasn't left us entirely defenseless when it comes to migration projects -- provided that certain precautions are taken. In keeping with Microsoft's focus on the larger enterprises, big deployments actually have more options available to them than smaller installations, especially for SMS (Systems Management Server) users.

Combine Active Directory with SMS, and you've already got a fairly automated engine for deploying new desktops. SMS can manage a standard XP desktop image, even customizing that image on an application level, while Active Directory can migrate individual or group resources and settings simply using the log-in prompt. For more detailed migration tasks, Microsoft has even more dedicated tools and processes such as the Business Desktop Deployment  model. But these require access not only to special tools but also specialized -- and thus expensive -- personnel as well.

Folks without these resources, however, have a wide range of third-party migration tools from which to choose. The best known is probably Symantec. Enterprise Ghost requires some prep time, but when running, it's saved my bacon plenty of times when deployment schedules became tight. The company also has a client migration tool, excitingly named Client Migration, which recently hit Version 3.0. Not only is this tool easier to use than Ghost, but it has better management tools, although you'll need to dedicate a machine to act as the Migration Server for most installations.

Smaller businesses are the ones truly challenged. But even here, Microsoft has built enough intelligence into its OSes to make these tasks manageable if not entirely without expense. Small Business Server has a full implementation of Active Directory, so combining this with even a single-user copy of Ghost means fewer Advils.