Documenting the Results of the Compatibility Testing

A number of documents can be produced during the compatibility testing process. Understanding the expectations of the stakeholders and what the documents will be used for is important. For example, more detailed budgetary information might need to be compiled based on the information, or go/no go decisions might need to be reached. Thus a summary of the improvements offered by Exchange Server 2003 in the areas of reliability, performance visible to the user community, and features improved and added, might need to be presented in a convincing fashion.

At a minimum, a summary of the testing process should be created, and a final recommendation for the applications to be included in the production upgrade or migration should be provided to the stakeholders. This can be as simple as the upgrade decision matrix discussed earlier in the chapter, or it can be more thorough, including detailed notes of the exact testing procedures followed. Notes can be made available summarizing the results of end-users testing, validating the applications, and describing results ”both positive and negative.

If the testing hardware is the same as the hardware that will be used in the production upgrade, server configuration documents that list the details of the hardware and software configurations can be created; they will ensure that the servers built in the production environment will have the same fundamental configuration as was tested in the lab.

A more detailed build document can be created that walks the technician through the exact steps required to build the Exchange Server 2003 system, in cases where many messaging servers need to be created in a short period of time.

The level of effort or the amount of time to actually perform the upgrade or the migration of a sample mailbox can be recorded as part of the documentation, and this information can be very helpful in planning the total amount of time that will be required to perform the upgrade or migration.