migration n. The process of making existing applications and data work on a different computer or OS.
That seems simple enough. Just last year, our IT department upgraded our laptops and desktop machines and migrated everyone to Windows XP. But in a recent briefing with OnDemand Software (http://www.ondemandsoftware.com), maker of the WinINSTALL family of products, I found out that my take on migration might be too narrow.
Paul Pieske, OnDemand vice president of marketing and business development, explained, "PC migration is more than a one-time event associated with moving a large number of corporate PCs from a legacy platform to a new OS platform. Some form of PC migration or PC upgrade takes place every day in the enterprise." For example, you might need to transfer applications and data from one PC to another PC, back up user settings and locally saved data from a PC to a repository, restore repository data to a PC, create a repository of policies that can be applied to a single machine or a group of machines, distribute policies from the repository to a machine or group of machines, or perform a complete client reset on one or more PCs.
"PC migration should be thought of as the day-to-day management of the PC environment that assures desktop availability over the life cycle of all the machines," Paul said. OnDemand's PC Migration System, which supports PC refresh, mass PC migration, and disaster recovery, is available with the WinINSTALL Desktop Availability Suite.
End of Article
