Free tool eases upgrade hassles, but only for small deployments
The market has been filling up with migration tools to help IT managers upgrade to Windows 7 from XP and many of our pages have been devoted to helping smooth the migration process. A Seattle company called Prowess offers one advantage over those of other comers because its solution is free.
SmartMigrate was released this week as a free beta from the company, which also markets a commercial professional version of the upgrade tool for larger IT systems. Of course, Microsoft offers free upgrade help as well, such as the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and the User State Migration Tool, as well as Microsoft Desktop Enterprise Virtualization (MED-V) and Application Virtualization (App-V). But they are more suited to large environments and can be more complicated and confusing than helpful for a small business or home-based business operator, said Aaron Suzuki, CEO of Prowess.
“The proscriptive advice from Microsoft isn’t always 100 percent clear,” said Suzuki, citing migration issues with application compatibility between XP and 7, the reluctance of some business users to give up Internet Explorer 6 and different virtualization computing models. (SmartMigrate is also targeted at small departments within larger organizations.)
And the issues that small and large organizations share as to migration is end user reluctance to move off of a system that they are familiar with and works well for them. Some companies report pushback from workers who say, “‘Where’s my Start menu? I don’t know how to use this computer. I want my old one back,’” said Spencer Dunford, director of sales for Prowess.
Enter SmartMigrate, a wizard-based tool that essentially delivers what Microsoft calls “XP mode” by facilitating a physical-to-virtual migration of Windows XP onto a virtual machine that runs on top of a computer running Windows 7.
“We thought it would be interesting to put out something that gives customers a very simple approach to the problem that would allow them to accelerate their Windows 7 migration … but also not force them to accelerate the retirement of their existing environment,” said Suzuki.
While some of the customer pushback may be exaggerated — the Start menu is in the same place in 7 as XP — XP users will eventually need to migrate away from it before long, whether someone’s holding their hand or not. The coming IE 9 browser will not run in XP and there have been other signs that the XP lifecycle is being accelerated.
I’m not endorsing SmartMigrate, just sharing news of it with you. It’s free, so there’s that, although Suzuki admits free means there’s no technical support. SmartMigrate will be included in Prowess’s SmartDeploy commercial product sometime in the first half of 2011.
Prowess may keep the free beta around as a separate product for a while, “like Gmail,” Suzuki said.
