Profile Migrations

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stew
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Stew

To All,

I have been a Project Manager and Technical Project Lead for numerous Active
Directory deployments and Windows Workstation Migrations. In any Migration
the customer (user) experience is the most difficult to manage. In so much as
this is true I have personally develioped numerous utility applications, and
scripting solutions for the migration of workstations. The latest is the
result of nearly 8 years of experience with migration strategy...

If you are migrating Windows workstations from one damain to another there
is a very simple and straight forward process that should be considered. This
process uses known Microsoft tools and technologies, in addition to a single
WSH script that will seemlessly migrate users profiles from the migrated
domain to your new Windows domain with little or no hands on effort.

If are interested in this technology it is free and I will provide the
outline of the process in addition to a list of tools to be leveraged. This
methodology is available to anyone who is NOT in the business of selling
migration tools of any kind!

Good luck with your deployments,

Stewart Basterash
(e-mail address removed)
 
Agree completely that this is one of the biggest issues with domain-based
networks. Not so much of a problem for the corporate site which is prepared
to spend hundreds of techsupport-hours planning a migration, but a major
issue for the smaller site, since the prep-work is no simpler but the
justification for the expense is far less.

My solution -strictly for one-per-desk environments- is to take the opposite
approach, and make all local useraccounts singular and identical. This
effectively avoids the profile-migration issues -if you want to swapout two
computers, you swap the (identically-named) userprofiles using WinPE or the
like, and the job is done. Network logon is handled independently of the
userprofile.

http://mylogon.net
 
My venues have always been the mid-sized and above organization. Usaully
1000-10000 users. In these organizations there are multiple modalities... One
size does not fit all. So domain migration is usually a big deal, customer
experience is parimount, but too often the Network apsects of the project
take up most of the resources for the project. It is these environments that
really need cost effective solutions. USMT is great for migrating profiles
from here to there, but what about a simple migration... When an organization
comes to me and says... "We need to build a new domain because someone said
we messed up our first swag, and it no longer accomidates our needs... So,
now we need to get everyone over to domain B." Or let's just say any
situation that requires you to integrate one domain into another. These
situations come up all the time. This is what my scripting solution handles...

I like the 80-20 approach... there are always the tough migrations, the easy
ones should be easy...
 
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