If you’re faced with the daunting task of migrating users to Windows 7, you need solutions that both make it easy and have zero impact on user productivity. Liquidware Labs solutions help you overcome migration challenges, while meeting your budget and timeframe requirements. Our solutions equip to you easily complete these necessary steps to ensure a smooth transition.
A critical first step is to get a complete inventory of the production desktops and applications throughout your organization. Then you must identify which applications currently support Windows 7 and plan for legacy and custom applications that must stay on previous Windows platforms until they can be migrated over. Liquidware Labs Stratusphere FIT is the ideal solution for performing a comprehensive assessment of your environment, providing detailed data about users and their locations, operating systems, applications, the network, as well as machine metrics. Stratusphere FIT can help you identify overprovisioned resources based on what applications are actually used versus provisioned. Stratusphere FIT also has built-in capabilities to assess for Windows 7 readiness. And, you can know at a glance which machines running Windows XP or earlier version have hardware capable of running Windows 7. Getting an accurate picture of your current environment helps determine how to allocate machines and applications in the Windows 7 desktop environment and equips you to make informed decisions every step of the way in your migration process.
With the launch of Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed the user profile format with new folder names and storage locations. This change 'broke' the ability of Windows XP/2000/and Server 2003 roaming profiles, and solutions that rely on roaming profiles, to migrate or co-exist with Windows 7 and later operating systems. Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity automatically virtualizes user profiles and settings and synchs mission critical user authored data to network or cloud storage. From the first time that ProfileUnity runs for a user it creates one unified Windows profile in native format that supports the user's ability to logon to any modern Windows operating system including XP/2000/Server 2003/Vista/Windows 7/Server 2008. This solution has also proven compatibility with the early developer's release of Windows 8. With ProfileUnity, users are ready for an Anytime Migration(TM) to Windows 7. User productivity is unaffected and acceptance of the new OS platform is seamless.
Migrations require a plan to take care of user authored data on legacy PCs. Relying on manual drag and drop for file transfers and disparate removable media is haphazard at best. An automated plan is best and helps to ensure that no mission critical data is left behind. ProfileUnity offers an EXCLUSIVE feature in its folder redirection module. When applied, this feature automatically harvests user authored data, such as My Documents, Photos, etc., from legacy desktops. The data is synched to a new location such as a network drive or external cloud storage providers. When the background synch has successfully completed, the folders are then redirected to the new location. This automatic data migration functionality is a powerful solution to help ensure that no mission critical data is left behind.
While you are migrating to Windows 7, you'll also likely be upgrading your applications to the latest version, including Microsoft Office and other popular third party applications. Application data settings such as Microsoft Outlook configurations, signatures, personal spell checker data, contact lists, and more, are easily lost without a proper planning. Organizations often also upgrade applications during an OS migration. ProfileUnity seamlessly makes users' custom application data settings available even across disparate versions of applications for virtually all applications. Users can seamlessly roam between versions of MS Office and most other applications, enjoy automatic configuration of new versions of applications, and retain custom configurations on Windows desktop. Mixed 32 and 64-bit platforms and applications versions are also seamlessly supported.
From day one of implementation, ProfileUnity does all of the work; one unified profile, background data migration, and compatible of application data settings - even across versions. ProfileUnity migrations are also extremely easy to configure. Our Guided Configuration Wizard automatically turns on all of the functionality you need to get started with a migration to your next version of Windows. Best of all, you can actually start the migrations process in your current version of the Windows OS and perform the final migration to Windows 7 anytime you are ready.
