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7 Steps to Windows 7 with Symantec

Symantec can help you meet the migration challenge—and capture the opportunity. With over a decade of experience and more than 300 million successful deployments and migrations, Symantec solutions streamline the migration process and keep you in control. Symantec's migration and deployment solutions cut the expense, delay, and disruption of your migration. And when you apply those savings to advanced Symantec solutions for security, virtualization, data protection, and management, you secure not only the one-time rewards from a smooth migration, but also long-term reliability, productivity, and security from an up-to-date, efficient, manageable IT environment.



Symantec’s 7-Step Process

Based on our experience with previous OS migrations, Symantec has developed a 7-step process for migrating to Windows 7:
  1. Assess the environment and plan your deployment - The first step includes discovering and evaluating hardware and software applications in your end-user environment, and identifying which ones will support Windows 7 and which ones need to be upgraded. Symantec solutions include pre-built reports that help you determine readiness and overcome infrastructure barriers for a smooth migration.
  2. Build standard Windows 7 images - Deploying standard hard disk images is the fastest, most consistent way to install a new operating system. You can also choose to create a single hardware-independent image or a small set of base images. A best practice is to keep images as small and generic as possible, adding only applications that must be installed on all computers. Symantec supports its own native file- and sector-based image format, Ghost images, and the Microsoft WIM format, so you can select what works best in your environment.
  3. Prepare your applications - Applications are the core of user productivity. Most commercial applications will eventually support Windows 7, but you will need to verify and remediate or replace legacy and custom applications. Up-front testing and consistent packaging reduce requirements for intervention and desktop visits. Symantec provides expertise with application repackaging to validate conflicts prior to migration, and application virtualization to ultimately resolve application compatibility problems.
  4. Capture user settings and personality variables - Corporate computer users don’t like change. They want to start up their new computers and see exactly
    what they saw on their old machines—the same printer settings, background pictures, Internet favorites, and everything they’ve personalized. Capturing these settings and applying them to the Windows 7 environment are necessary requirements to maintain productivity and accelerate acceptance.
    Symantec takes the mystery out of the process with pre-built templates for more than 60 applications, as well as a custom personality builder that fully automates the creation of templates for other commercial or homegrown applications.
  5. Automate and assemble the migration process - Now that the pieces are in place, you need to hook them together and encapsulate the templates and files
    into an automated job or workflow sequence. This process ensures that when one task completes, the next is triggered automatically. Symantec provides pre-defined sample jobs and wizards that guide you through the process, ensuring your
    ultimate success.
  6. Migrate systems - Before you can successfully migrate on a large scale, you need to know what is in front of you. A pilot project is the best way to simulate each step. Once you’ve proved the migration process is sound, you are ready to migrate your entire organization based on a defined rollout schedule. One click and it’s time to sit back and relax. Symantec solutions let you create groups of test systems for the pilot and then stage the rollout based on your priorities. More importantly, you can utilize integrated backup technologies to ensure a risk-free
    process that allows you to easily revert back to the previous system in case of an unexpected failure.
    7. Measure and report - Once your automated migration is complete, an important step remains: post-migration reporting and analysis. Good reporting helps your executive team track your migration from a distance, and helps you capture what you’ve learned for the next time. Symantec solutions include customizable reports and dashboards that let you evaluate the effectiveness of the rollout. You can easily determine how many machines were migrated as well as how long the process took, and track any reported problems. These metrics help you demonstrate that the project was delivered on time and under budget.