Some readers have questioned my support for upgrading your desktops to Windows Vista. Not the upgrade itself, but the “haste” I seem to be advocating. So I’ll say again what I believe is the best path to take: commit to the upgrade, but thoroughly test the new system in a laboratory or “sandbox” environment, then gradually move one or two installations onto the production network – for trusted users – before committing to a full-scale rollout. Vista provides a more secure, more robust – and more useful – platform than the Windows XP, ME, NT or 9x that you are managing for your users.

To help you plan and rollout a migration to Vista, my friends at Realtime Publishers are in the midst of publishing “The Definitive Guide to Vista Migration” by Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest and sponsored by Altiris.

The authors agree with my thoughts about Vista, by the way: “Will Vista warrant yet another massive Windows desktop migration? The answer is yes - Vista heralds a completely new era in secure Windows computing, complete with support for the very latest in service-oriented architectures and the provision of a host of services that can traverse the firewall over the most common HTTP and HTTPS ports.”

The e-book will eventually be 10 chapters:

* Chapter 1 starts with the business case, offering a template business case you can adapt to your needs in support of your own deployment project.

* Chapter 2 will provide you with a structured migration strategy, the QUOTE System, which is a system we have been using for almost a decade to help customers manage change in their networks.

* Chapter 3 will outline how to rely on virtualization technology to create migration testing environments so that you can ensure that your solution is completely functional before you put it into production.

* Chapter 4 discusses the various tools you need to build the migration toolkit. This includes both technical and administrative or non-technical tools. In short, everything you need to make the migration to this new operating system as smooth as possible at every level of the organization — end-user, technical, support—and keep it under budget.

* Chapter 5 looks at the changes you need to make in your existing infrastructure to support the deployment. It also identifies all of the security elements of the migration, focusing on the principle of least privilege but still ensuring that this critical project runs efficiently.