One of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies with over a hundred offices worldwide faced an enormous challenge: to complete a hardware refresh and the migration of data, settings and applications of roughly 100,000 Windows® PCs to Windows 8. The scenario was complicated by the fact that the vast majority of the employee’s PCs were running Windows XP, while the number of employees who had already upgrade to a Windows 7 OS was fairly small.
Simplicity turned out to be a very important factor for selecting the right product performing this large scale migration. “We needed a solution that allowed the company’s employees to migrate their own data without a support technician’s assistance,” the project manager said. The company wanted software that would be easily configured, intuitive, and not require a technical expert to oversee each person’s progress, globally. A manual migration would be too complicated and is typically not as thorough or time-effective as an automated migration solution.
Additional requirements were the following:
- Simple and intuitive to use, without the use of XML;
- Highly scalable to support up to 100,000 PCs;
- Supports multiple Windows OS versions;
- A proven solution for Enterprise-grade scenarios.
A big concern was how the PC deployment would impact employee’s productivity. In case of a manual migration, the possibility that not all of the old PC’s files, settings or even applications would successfully migrate was very high. With that, employees would then spend unnecessary time to manually search for files, settings and other things and would have to download and reinstall applications needed to do their job. All of that could also turn into increased support time provided by the respective help-desk/technical support, adding to non-productive times and negative impact to their bottom line.
In prior migration projects, whether for hardware refreshes or in-place upgrades, the company used the User State Migration Tool™ (USMT) from Microsoft®. However, for this project, USMT wasn’t the right fit since it does not support a migration of applications.
Without all critical applications being migrated over, many employees could not continue to complete their daily tasks. The company would also have to factor in the additional cost of the media replacement.
Also, USMT requires advanced XML expertise on an ongoing basis, and offers limited customization, even to those with the technical capabilities. The cost of hiring an XML expert to configure this process is substantial, especially considering the global footprint of this project. Finally the time frame of a migration of this magnitude could have gone on for an extended period of time, ultimately costing the company unnecessary resources.
The solution the company chose was Laplink® PCmover Enterprise. PCmover enabled them to complete this massive migration without losing data and applications, even the specialized, less common ones that many of the company’s employees used. This contributed early on to upper management’s approval of the PCmover solution.
Additionally, PCmover’s simple “wizard” interface was a plus. Instead of subjecting employees worldwide to a huge, unwieldy directory to view their migrated data, PCmover requires no technical expertise, works straight out of the box, and displays the information in a simple, easy-to[1]understand format. Employees worldwide experienced uninterrupted productivity by using PCmover Enterprise.
Using PCmover Enterprise over solutions like USMT, the company saved the tremendous cost of hiring a team of XML specialists to oversee the global PC migration process. For users already running Windows 7, the ability to use PCmover without reconfiguration to migrate to Windows 8 was a considerable advantage compared to the alternatives.
“We evaluated many data migration solutions, but we decided on PCmover as it seemed to meet our very specific requirements”, said the project manager. He was impressed with the dramatic time reduction for a typical migration. The time to complete the company’s entire migration for almost 100,000 PCs was thirteen months.
To learn more about PCmover Enterprise, visit https://enterprise.laplink.com or contact corpsales@laplink.com
Neil is the Senior Director of Inside Sales & Marketing at Laplink. His sales and marketing expertise includes email marketing, lead nurturing, marketing automation, database marketing, user experience optimization, website optimization, testing, PPC (Pay Per Click), Google analytics and social media. Prior to joining Laplink, he was Account Director at Indigo Slate, Senior Account Manager at Oracle, and Dell Brand Manager and Digital Marketing Manager at Zones, Inc. Neil holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications, Advertising and Business from Brigham Young University. Neil’s hobbies include playing golf and competitive volleyball. When he’s not busy spending time with his family, you'll find him on the golf course perfecting his swing!
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