Microsoft Windows XP Professional Resource Kit 2003
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 338
Pages: 338
Microsoft Windows XP Professional is designed to meet your organization s business needs. This chapter helps you determine the best way to deploy the operating system in your organization. Deploying Windows XP Professional requires careful planning. Before you install Windows XP Professional on your desktop computers, you must determine whether you need to upgrade your hardware and applications. Then you must decide which features to install, how much centralized control to maintain over users computers, and which installation methods to use.
For more information about installing Windows XP Professional, see Automating and Customizing Installations and Supporting Installations in this book.
The first step in the deployment process is to assess your business needs so that you can define the project scope and objectives. Next, decide how best to use Windows XP Professional to meet those needs. Then, assess your current network and desktop configurations, determine whether you need to upgrade your hardware or software, and choose the tools for your deployment.
Having made these decisions, you are ready to plan your deployment. An effective plan typically includes the following:
All the details for customizing Windows XP Professional.
A schedule for the deployment.
An assessment of your current configuration (including information about your users, organizational structure, network infrastructure, and hardware and software needs).
Test and pilot plans.
A rollout plan.
Create a test environment in which you can deploy Windows XP Professional by using the features and options in your plan. Have your test environment mirror, as closely as possible, your users network, including hardware, network architecture, and business applications.
When you are satisfied with the results in your test environment, roll out your deployment to a specific group of users to test the results in a controlled production environment (a pilot).
Finally, roll out Windows XP Professional to your entire organization.
Creating the deployment plan is a cyclic process. As you move through each phase, modify the plan based on your experiences.
The scope is the baseline for creating a functional specification for your deployment project. The scope of your deployment project is defined largely by your answers to the following questions:
What business needs do you want to address with Windows XP Professional?
What are the long-term IT goals for the deployment project?
How will your Windows XP Professional client computers interact with your IT infrastructure?
Document your computing environment, looking at your organizational structure and how it supports your users. Use this assessment to determine your readiness for desktop deployment of Windows XP Professional. The three major areas of your computing environment to assess include your hardware, software, and network.
Do your desktop and mobile computers meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Professional? In addition to meeting these requirements, all hardware devices must be compatible with Windows XP Professional.
Are your applications compatible with Windows XP Professional? Make sure that all your applications, including custom-designed software, work with computers running Windows XP Professional.
Document your network architecture, including topology, size, and traffic patterns. Also, determine which users need access to various applications and data, and describe how they obtain access.
Where appropriate, create diagrams to include in your project plan.
Before rolling out your deployment project, you need to test it for functionality in a controlled environment. Before you begin testing your deployment project, create a test plan that describes the tests you will run, the expected results, a schedule for performing tests, and who will run each test. The test plan must specify the criteria and priority for each test. Prioritizing your tests can help you avoid slowing down your deployment because of minor failures that can be easily corrected later; it can also help you identify larger problems that might require redesigning your deployment plan.
The testing phase is essential because a single error condition can be duplicated to all computers in your environment if it is not corrected before you deploy the image. It is recommended that you roll out the deployment to a small group of users after you test the project. Piloting the installation allows you to assess the success of the deployment project in a production environment before rolling it out to all users.
Create a test lab that is not connected to your network but mirrors, as closely as possible, your organization s network and hardware configurations. Set up your hardware, software, and network services as they are in your users environment.
Perform comprehensive testing on each hardware platform, testing both application installation and operation. This can greatly increase the confidence of the project teams and the business-decision makers, resulting in a higher quality deployment.
To pilot the project, roll out the deployment to a small group of users. The primary purpose of pilot projects is not to test Windows XP Professional. Instead, the aim of your early pilots is to get user feedback for the project team. This feedback is used to further determine the features that you need to enable or disable in Windows XP Professional. This is particularly relevant if you upgrade from Microsoft Windows 98 or Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (Me), which do not include features such as domain-based computer accounts, local security, and file system security. For pilots, you might choose a user population that represents a cross-section of your business in terms of job function and computer proficiency. Install pilot systems by using the same method that you plan to use for the final rollout.
The pilot process provides a small-scale test of the eventual full-scale rollout, so you can use the results of the pilot, including any problems encountered, to finalize your rollout plan. Compile the pilot results and use the data to estimate upgrade times, the number of concurrent upgrades you can sustain, and peak loads on the user support functions.
After you thoroughly test your deployment plan and pilot the deployment to smaller groups of users, and you are satisfied with the results, begin rolling out Windows XP Professional to the rest of your organization.
To finalize the rollout plan, you need to determine the following:
The number of computers to be included in each phase of the rollout.
The time needed to upgrade or perform a clean installation for each computer to be included.
The personnel and other resources needed to complete the rollout.
The time frame during which you plan to roll out the installations to different groups.
Training needed for users throughout the organization.
Throughout the rollout, gather feedback from users and modify the deployment plan as appropriate.
For more information about performing upgrades or clean installations, see Automating and Customizing Installations in this book.