Windows XP Migration: Overcoming the Top Five Roadblocks

Migrations are among the potentially most disruptive, costly and risky IT endeavors, which is why many organizations have delayed moving off Windows XP, even though support will end on April 8, 2014. Companies of all sizes are now grappling with how to clear the toughest roadblocks, including application compatibility; lost user productivity; repackaging, remediating and deploying apps; user training and support; and available time to perform migrations amidst other IT priorities.

The good news? Technologies and best practices are available to automate each phase of the migration planning and execution process, so companies can minimize security risks and user downtime while accelerating their Windows migration initiative. Quest Software’s David Kloba, general manager of endpoint systems management, and Michael Tweddle, director of product management for Windows management, have identified five best practices for removing the toughest roadblocks.

Click through for five best practices for removing the toughest roadblocks in a Windows XP migration, as identified by Quest Software.

While the obvious solution is to plan ahead, many organizations fail to maintain up-to-date inventories of hardware, applications and users. To avoid an inordinate amount of time dealing with incompatible peripherals or missing drives, it is important to create and maintain a complete, updated inventory of all hardware, applications and users.

In order to reduce migration time and effort, it’s critical to eliminate unused, outdated and redundant applications. This enables organizations to yield significant savings by reducing the time spent testing, remediating and repackaging.

One of the biggest hurdles to a successful Windows XP migration is application compatibility – the longest phase of most migration projects. Application compatibility testing, remediation and repackaging is not only time-consuming, but is also an error-prone process. By taking the extra step to automate testing and application remediation, organizations can slash migration time and costs.

One of the most disruptive aspects of a migration project is the actual migration of end-user systems, which can cause excessive user productivity losses. Automation is the key to terminating productivity loss. With dynamic deployments companies can go beyond automation of manual migration tasks to perform remote deployment and configurations of operating systems, applications, service packs, patches or virtually any digital asset.

Support the new environment as soon as the first user is migrated. By managing the entire lifecycle system with automated tools that track and manage systems, organizations will easily and effectively ensure that the new environment continues to deliver value and give IT flexibility to optimize other investments.