Benefits Analysis and Recommendations

Benefits analysis and recommendations is what the assessment is all about. You have identified goals that need to be achieved for the migration, assessed and analyzed the existing environment, and reviewed best practices and Windows 2003 features. Now you put it all together in a nice neat package of recommendations.

Recommendation Categories

These recommendations will certainly vary from one migration to another, but the recommendations will probably come in these categories:

• Security

• System Administration

• Mail and Messaging

• Hardware Upgrades

• Organizational Issues

• Server Systems Topology Issues, Problems, and Limitations

• Network Topology Issues, Problems, and Limitations

• Network Services Issues, Problems, and Limitations

• OS and Server Issues, Problems, and Limitations

• User Working Environment Issues, Problems, and Limitations

• Impact of Future Releases of Windows on this migration

Migration Methodology

At this point, it's appropriate to recommend the method of migration that you will use. The basic migration methods and paths were covered in Chapter 3, "Migration Planning: Business and Technical." Having completed the assessment to this point, it should be fairly clear whether you should use an in-place upgrade or a restructuring method, or perhaps a hybrid as Compaq did. Whatever the recommendation, you should have a strategy developed at this point for accomplishing it, as described in Chapter 3.