Planning installations, upgrades, or migration of your computers to new operating systems.

Over the years, TechPoint has helped many businesses with upgrades or migrations of their office computers and networks from one operating system to another. With that experience in mind, here are some hints and tips to plan you plan for a successful migration:

  • Backup your data and systems! Always! So if anything goes sideways, you don’t lose you data and it can be restored to your system once the migration is complete.
  • Plan the scope of the project:
    • Is the operating system a relatively simple upgrade, a migration, or are you doing a fresh installation?
    • Identify what systems will be affected by the migration or upgrade, and to what extent.
    • Identify that your software will still run on your new systems; if not, your software may need upgrading too.
    • Ensure that your hardware will run the new OS, and future versions to. If not, it may be time to purchase new hardware.
  • Plan your team:
    • Do you have the right personnel on your staff to manage and complete the migration?
    • Does your team have the bandwidth to complete the project?

If not, you may want to partner with TechPoint in order to make sure that your project is successful.

  • Plan your project structure and schedule: Ensure that you have all the right pieces in place: backups of your current systems, master operating system images, corporate software packages, patches and hot fixes, and customized configurations or packages that your company uses, etc., so that you’re not caught off-guard by an unexpected installation that you were otherwise unaware of.
    • Make sure that you have all items for your servers, desktop computers, thin-clients, POS systems, tablets, and other hardware.
    • Create a schedule for your plan, so you know at what point each item is being upgraded, installed, or migrated, for instance, maybe schedule your servers first, then your desktops, then other hardware.
  • Plan a test procedure: Thoroughly test each upgraded system before you move on to the next. This is particularly true of servers as they form the back bone of your network.
  • Communicate with your end users throughout: Make sure that you stay in touch with your users; keep them informed of the project schedule, so they know what systems will be affected, and when those systems will be offline.  And they also need to be able to communicate with your project team, as more often than not, there will be issues at the client-end that need resolving as their systems are upgraded.


Hopefully these guidelines will help you through a system installation, upgrade or migration. Remember that TechPoint are always available if you need assistance with your project. Whether you just need planning advice, or a full project scope, we’re there for you.


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