IT Professional Featured Article: Upgrading Your Users to Windows XP Professional

Plan Ahead: Upgrading Your Users to Windows XP Professional

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Microsoft Windows XP Professional has earned kudos for its reliability and performance and has several enhancements that make your life as an IT administrator easier. In this light, the question you may ask yourself is not whether you should upgrade your users to this successor to Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, but how. You could take a leap of faith and hope that it all works out, but why take the chance? By reviewing your network infrastructure now, understanding the capabilities of Microsoft Windows XP Professional, and making a few simple plans, you will have a better shot at rolling out Windows XP smoothly.

In this feature, I'll discuss the key issues and strategies you should consider when upgrading users to Windows XP Professional and review some of the Windows XP Professional features that make administration easier. I'll also point out some of the great information you'll find in Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrator's Pocket Consultant, a book from Microsoft Press that is an indispensable reference in your library.

Before the Rollout: Know Your Network

Once you've decided to roll out Windows XP Professional to some or all of your users, you'll need to review and assess your current network infrastructure. If this information isn't documented somewhere in your organization, now is a great time to do it. Understanding and documenting the following information about your network will make your rollout decisions markedly easier:

Is Your Hardware and Software Ready?

Before you roll out Windows XP on your organization's desktops, one of your first tasks is to determine whether your users' systems can handle the upgrade. Table 1 shows the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for installing Windows XP Professional.

Table 1. Windows XP Professional Hardware Requirements.

Next, you'll need to determine whether your users have hardware that is compatible with Windows XP Professional. Microsoft has tested thousands of hardware devices for compatibility with the latest version of Microsoft Windows. You can find a list of supported hardware at the Microsoft Hardware Compatibility List Web site.

You also need to determine whether the BIOS of your users' computers is compatible with Windows XP. If not, you'll need to contact the hardware manufacturer's Web site and download the latest BIOS update. If your users don't meet the minimum system requirements or have hardware that is not on the hardware compatibility list, your first order of business is to upgrade their hardware.

After you're sure your users' systems and hardware can support Windows XP Professional, you'll need to turn your attention towards the applications in use by your organization. As I mentioned earlier, documenting the software your organization uses will make your job easier. A tool such as Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) comes in handy for tracking your hardware and software inventory. The Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit provides in-depth information about using SMS for software deployment and management. In particular, the Windows 2000 Server Deployment Planning Guide volume discusses using SMS to deploy Windows operating systems in Chapter 14, "Using Systems Management Server to Deploy Windows 2000."

You'll eventually need to test all the applications you expect to use with Windows XP Professional even administrative tools such as backup software. In general, although there are exceptions such as some anti-virus software, applications that run on Windows NT 4.0 and 3.51 and Windows 2000 Professional will run on Windows XP Professional. In addition, Microsoft has provided fixes for hundreds of applications that didn't run properly on earlier versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, some applications written for Windows 95 or Windows 98 might not run properly on Windows XP Professional. If this is the case, you will discover it during compatibility testing.

One of the best ways to test for hardware and software compatibility is to run Windows XP Professional Setup in the Check Upgrade Only mode. The Check Upgrade Only mode tests the upgrade process and gives you a report that shows potential problems before you actually install Windows XP. The report shows hardware and software compatibility issues that may make upgrading a pain, such as unsupported Plug and Play hardware, unsupported software, and software that should be reinstalled after the upgrade. To run Windows XP Professional Setup in Check Upgrade Only mode, you run Winnt32.exe from the i386 folder with the command-line switch checkupgradeonly.

Review Your Current Policies

You should document your organization's current and needed system policies to determine which policies you will implement when upgrading your users. In Windows XP Professional, the set of rules that help you manage users and computers is generally accomplished through Group Policy. For example, with Group Policy you can customize certain policies such as preventing users from installing applications that they don't need in their jobs. Windows XP Professional includes over 200 new policies in addition to those provided previously by Windows 2000 Professional.

To use Group Policy and other features that make your life as an administrator easier, you need to implement Active Directory. If you're running Windows 2000 Server and you haven't enabled Active Directory, you should consider doing so now.

Group policies are flexible; you can apply them to multiple domains, to individual domains, to subgroups within a domain, or to individual systems. Chapter 8 of the Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrator's Pocket Consultant describes how group policies work for sites, domains, and organizational units (OUs): "Each site, domain, and OU can have one or more group policies. Group policies higher in the Group Policy list have a higher precedence than policies lower in the list. Group policies set at this level are associated with Active Directory. This ensures that site policies get applied appropriately throughout the related domains and OUs."

Working with Group Policy in Windows XP Professional is straightforward using the Group Policy snap-in:

Consider the Network Connections

With Windows XP Professional, network configuration for your users is easy. However, you should plan how your users will connect to the network. Windows XP Professional uses TCP/IP as its standard protocol, although as you would expect, it also supports other protocols such as NWLink and IPX. During a typical installation, Windows XP automatically installs networking components if a computer is connected to a network.

You have two basic choices for configuring IP addressing for communicating over TCP/IP. You can manually assign a static IP address, or, more typically, have a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server assign an IP address at startup. Chapter 11 of the Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrator's Pocket Consultant describes how to configure dynamic addresses for a typical user's desktop computer.

You'll need to consider remote users in your plan, and determine whether they will utilize Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections (Figure 1). VPNs are a popular way to secure and extend your private network over an existing dial-up or broadband connection. Windows XP makes setting up a VPN connection straightforward using the New Connection Wizard.

Figure 1

Assess Your Security Needs

With Windows XP Professional, your users can take advantage of security services that aren't available for users running other operating systems such as Windows 98. Access control lists (ACLs), security groups, and Group Policy make Windows XP Professional a flexible choice for administrators.

When users are signing on, Windows XP Professional authenticates them with a single password. If your organization has Windows 2000 domains, Kerberos V5 is the primary security protocol. If you still have servers running Windows NT 4.0, the new Windows XP Professional clients use Windows NT Challenge/Response (NTLM) authentication. If you have implemented Active Directory, you can use Group Policy settings to manage logon security. For more information about how Kerberos authentication is implemented in Windows 2000 Server, refer to the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit. The Windows 2000 Server Deployment Planning Guide volume discusses Kerberos security policy parameters and other settings in Chapter 11, "Planning Distributed Security."

You can make managing access to resources easier by using security groups that have security descriptors associated with them. For example, you can grant certain users permission to specific files or folders. You define security groups in domains using Active Directory Users and Computers. There are several preconfigured security groups, but you can configure ACLs to add remote users or resources from the groups. You can also use Group Policy settings to assign permissions to resources.

If you want to provide your users even greater data security, Windows XP supports file encryption of data on NTFS volumes using Encrypting File System (EFS). Using the EFS format, only the person who encrypted the file can read it. Before other users can read an encrypted file, the original user must decrypt it. Chapter 13 of the Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrator's Pocket Consultant provides this precaution on using EFS: "On NTFS volumes, files remain encrypted even when they're moved, copied, and renamed. If you copy or move an encrypted file to a FAT or FAT-32 drive, the file is automatically decrypted before being copied or moved. Thus, you must have proper permissions to copy or move the file."

Test and Get Ready to Deploy

Before you actually roll out a Windows XP Professional deployment, you'll need to test it. Microsoft recommends that you test your deployment in a controlled environment that mirrors your actual network configuration (but is not connected to the actual network). You'll set up, as closely as possible, a user's hardware, software, and network services. The goal is to perform testing on the hardware and applications to increase your confidence that the rollout will go smoothly. As one last step, you should perform pilot testing to a small group of users to determine which Windows XP features to enable or disable.

Finally, when you're ready to roll out Windows XP to your users' desktops, Microsoft has several tools to help administrators install the new operating system effectively. One of these tools is the System Preparation Tool (SysPrep), which helps you clone computer configurations, systems, and applications. You might also investigate using the User State Migration Tool, which enables you to migrate your users' data and settings from their old computers to new Windows XP Professional desktops.

In addition to these tools, you can make it easier to install, update, and manage your users' computers by standardizing a desktop configuration. Standardizing the desktop configuration that works on all systems is important because it makes tasks such as system upgrades and troubleshooting easier. You can get up to speed on many of these technologies at the Microsoft Windows XP site.

Microsoft Press Solutions

Resources from Microsoft Press can help you get the most out of Windows XP. Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrator's Pocket Consultant focuses on user and system administration tasks such as:

The Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit is a must-have resource for administering users running Microsoft Windows operating systems. The resource kit, created by the Windows 2000 product team, contains detailed technical information about Windows 2000 Server. The kit has over 200 tools and utilities on CD-ROM and contains these volumes:

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