Chapter 2. Planning, Prototyping, Migrating, and Deploying Windows Server 2003 Best Practices

In This Chapter

• Determining the Scope of Your Project

• Identifying the Business Goals and Objectives to Implement Windows Server 2003

• Identifying the Technical Goals and Objectives to Implement Windows Server 2003

• The Discovery Phase: Understanding the Existing Environment

• The Design Phase: Documenting the Vision and the Plan

• The Migration Planning Phase: Documenting the Process for Migration

• The Prototype Phase: Creating and Testing the Plan

• The Pilot Phase: Validating the Plan to a Limited Number of Users

• The Migration/Implementation Phase: Conducting the Migration or Installation

Far too many organizations implement a new application or upgrade to the new version of an operating system without fully understanding the goals and objectives of the upgrade and the breadth and scope of benefits the implementation will provide. While the migration is completed successfully from a technical implementation perspective, far too frequently users don't acknowledge significant improvements from the implementation, and the business goals and objectives of the organization's executives are not realized. This lack of vision of the implementation's benefits can jeopardize funding of future projects and affect the satisfaction of the user community.

This chapter examines how a structured four-step process for migrating to the Windows Server 2003 environment can enhance the success of the project. Consisting of discovery, design, testing, and implementation phases, this methodology can be scaled to meet the needs of the wide variety of organizations and businesses that use Microsoft technologies. The results of this methodology are three very important documents created to map out the implementation process: the design document, the migration document, and the migration plan.

The examples used in this chapter assume that the environments being migrated are primarily NT4 or Windows 2000 based, but the concepts and process can certainly apply to other environments.