A large number of businesses have been putting off migrating from either Windows XP or Windows Vista to Windows 7 for various reasons. Some do not really want to make the move because of fears of application incompatibility. Others fear the costs to the IT department may be high due to unforeseen difficulties with the migration.

The problem with postponing is the fact that support will not be available forever from either Microsoft or applications on older systems like Windows XP or Windows Vista. New hardware will in the end come out without support for legacy operating systems. For this reason organizations should prepare for and eventually complete a Windows 7 migration.

How

The starting point in doing a Windows 7 migration is to make an evaluation in regards to what difficulties there may be. It's important to be sure that all troubles are found. The first section of problems includes issues with software that are used with the organization.

Yet another area of frequent problems is hardware drivers or the lack thereof in Windows 7. Some hardware may be so old and unsupported that they will not have a related driver that works in Windows 7. That is a problem that will need to be managed before the migration either with the removal of the hardware, finding a compatible hardware driver, or purchasing alternative hardware compatible with Windows 7.

Optimization

Yet another area of issue to many IT departments thinking about a Windows 7 migration is overall performance. Nobody would like to complete an operating system upgrade with slower performance as a result. Ideally, the overall performance should be faster after the upgrade to Windows 7. Only proceed with the migration when system performance is acceptable in the new environment.

There are steps that IT departments can take to enhance the future Windows 7 environment such as making sure the existing applications are upgraded or patched to a version that supports Windows 7 and by making systems settings that make sense with all the applications that are being run on the system. This should be established in a test environment prior to any migration in production in order to not inconvenience the people.

Maintenance

Once the IT department has completed a Windows 7 migration successfully, the interest ought to be placed on putting in some form of patch management that maintains the Windows 7 systems safe and practicing reliably. There are always bugs and security problems that should be fixed via patches. You need to have them installed regularly on all Windows 7 systems.

To do patch maintenance personally can be foolish, costly, and time consuming. It is far better to figure out ways to automate some of the patch management processes so that the Windows 7 systems remain up-to-date with Microsoft's recommended patches. There should additionally be a place and mechanism to try the patches before pushing them to the production environment. Doing proper patch management can prevent a lot of headaches for the IT department.