March 2, 2010. World Record Office 2003 to Office 2007 Migration

On March 2, 2010 in Hannover on the Cebit we are going to break a world record in migrating 1000 Virtual machines from Office 2003 to Office 2010 with Symantec Workspace Virtualization.

Many companies struggle with the migration from Office 2003 to Office 2007. This migration needs to be planned carefully and well judged, to make the chance on mistakes as small as possible. It is not only the migration itself, but you also have to take care about settings, Outlook profiles and other important configurations. With deploying Office 2007 there is also a new Microsoft Access, and administrators have to be careful in this change to make sure that your end users will be able to do their work.

When your company wants to migrate you have to make a well chosen and designed plan. And also be aware of a rollback scenario.

Luckily for us we can use Symantec's Workspace Virtualization to make the chance on mistakes smaller.

First we have to develop a new Virtual Archive for Office 2007. The best way to do this is to create a full package. Choose full options and install the whole suite on disk instead of install when necessary. In a later arena you wil always be able to hide or block certain options in GPOs. This ensures that end users will never have the need to install new software.

Deploy the new package to a few computers and logon with various test users to see if all options are configured well and that there are no installation screens showing up.

At first run there are always some options that need to be configured for the end user, but these settings will be kept inside the package in the read/write part of the layer.

When the package is finished and you are sure that all options work, your GPOs are configured and you assured that all settings go over smoothly in the transition. You will be able to deploy the package to all computers that need to be migrated.

First step in this action is to create a plan how to uninstall Office 2003. If you already have Office 2003 virtualised this is absolutely not a difficult plan, because you will be able to de-activate the package. But if your Office 2003 installation is installed locally, this will be a huge task.

You now have two options.

Uninstall Office 2003 and activate Office 2007 so that your end users can start working. This task can be done easiest with Symantecs Deployment Solution and you create an uninstall task to run on all computers. It does not only prevent you from walking to every computer, but it can also be done in offtime hours. Altiris Deployment Solution can wake on lan the client and perform the action and then shut it down again.

But in this case you have no roll back scenario if something goes wrong. In a small company you can choose to reinstall Office 2003 but when you manage over 1000 Computers it will be very difficult to do this.

A better path for this would be to create a Virtual package of Office 2003 and import it on every client. Then uninstall Office 2003 and when you need a rollback scenario you can activate the layer so that the end user can do his work again with the old version. Make sure you test this very well to ensure that your endusers can do their work at any time.

At the moment that you have a virtual Office 2003 and a virtual Office 2007, you can start your migration.

There are many ways to de-activate the Office 2003 layer and activate the Office 2007 layer. You can create a logon script or use SVS logon hook. You can do it with Altiris Deployment Solution. You can also do it with Altiris Notification Server.

March 2 to March 6 the yearly Cebit will be in Hannover Germany. This show attracts many IT administrators and this year there is a complete pavilion with companies who do virtualization.

At this show DinamiQs will break some world records and this is one of them.

At this show we have prepared everything. Over 1000 Virtual Machines will be running with Office 2003 and we are going to do a mass Office 2007 migration over there.

With the DinamiQs management console and Symantec Workspace Virtualization we are going to de-activate Office 2003 on over 1000 Virtual Machines and then we are going to activate Office 2007 on all machines at the same time.

This will all be done in less then 60 seconds on all 1000 clients simultaneously.

And if something goes wrong???? We migrate back in 60 seconds.

Join us in our quest Tuesday the second and enjoy the show.