XP, Office and Outlook migration question:

[jefblack]

We are preparing to roll out a new desktop environment. Our current environment is Windows 2000, SP4, Office 2000 SR1, including Outlook 2000 in an Exchange 5.5 organization. We will be migrating to Windows XP, SP2, Office XP and Outlook 2003. Our migration to Exchange 2003 is in the works, but we will continue on Exchange 5.5 for the time being. We are in a native mode Windows Server 2003 Domain

I want to minimize the impact to the end-user experience. We are also using AutoCAD 2004 and other profile aware applications. I was considering copying user profiles to a temporary machine, applying the new build to their machines then copying the user profiles back. Our organization considers that this is a good time for a fresh start in terms of the user profiles and wants to manually recreate drive and printer mappings, and copy only a minimum of information for the old profile, such as My Documents, Favorites, etc. My thought is that we will lose the user’s individual AutoCAD configuration, Outlook signatures and a lot of other items.

I believe that the technicians will be spending more time and effort to copy individual portions of the profile and manually configuring the remainder of the settings. I also expect that the end user would spend additional time putting things back to their liking. When other users hear of this they will likely copy data from their machines to their personal folders as well, and you know once something gets put on a server, it is less likely to come back off.

My question is this: Have any of you experienced negative effects from moving user profiles between 2000 and XP, from Office 2000 to Office XP or from Outlook 2000 to 2003?

 

[tf1]

This is a hard call: in a way, the techies are correct in that it is a good idea to start from a clean slate but it will take longer (probably twice as long). AutoCAD is a royal PITA: in my experience, just updating the printer driver is sufficient to screww up all the user settings and as you will have to install new printer drivers, you will probably have to do this anyway.

One point: have you considered the implications of deploying Outlook 2003 with Office XP? If the Outlook version differs from Office you lose much functionality: you cannot use Word as the email editor, you cannot use File, Send To from any Office app, etc.

Is there a particular reason that you are not deploying Office 2k3 now? Moving to Off2k3 now will save considerable work migrating later and there are probably many features in 2k3 that will benefit many of the workers. Calendaring and collaboration features are much improved.

Good luck with making the right decision: it isn't a simple one!

Regards: tf1

 

[jefblack]

On the question of splitting the Office and Outlook versions. Our current licensing situation allows us to run Office XP. Our Exchange 2003 License allows us to run Outlook 2003.

One other drawback of splitting the Office and Outlook versions is that Mr. Clippy doesn't pop up when opening Office programs anymore, he doesn't like the 2003 version of Mr. Clippy I guess!

Unfortunately I can't change where we are on the license part of things, but thanks for the reply. Anyone else have issues with moving profiles accross versions of Office, Outlook and from 2000 to XP?