• Sidebar: Desktop Refresh Process
• Sidebar: What are Solution Accelerators?

The Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) Solution Accelerator, a set of tools and documentation for automating client software upgrades to the latest versions of Windows and Office, has been updated. The new accelerator brings together a set of offerings that Microsoft hopes will reduce the costs and risks associated with migrating large numbers of desktops and guide customers and service partners toward best practices for performing these migrations. However, the tools are complex and require a great deal of planning and testing, costs that must be allocated over a large number of standardized desktops before lower per-desktop deployment costs can be realized.

(The term desktop is used throughout this article and the BDD documents to refer to both desktop and portable PCs.)

Desktop Deployment a Key 2005 Initiative

One of Microsoft’s major "go-to-market" marketing campaigns for its 2005 fiscal year is to accelerate the rate at which customers upgrade their desktop and notebook systems to Windows XP and Office 2003. This is not simply a push for upgrade revenue; it is also designed to ensure that customers who have already paid for these products as part of Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement (EA) and similar volume licensing programs actually deploy and get value out of the upgrade before their contracts come up for renewal.

In addition, Microsoft wants to see newer products deployed because many older versions have security problems, are difficult for Microsoft to support, and are nearing or past end-of-life.

The campaign has a long way to go: the company estimates that 35% of desktops are still on Windows 9x or Windows NT 4.0, and Gartner says Office 2000 remains the most popular desktop productivity suite. However, Microsoft and partners such as Intel believe that the time is now right to push upgrades. IT spending is rebounding, and the average desktop in a large number of firms was installed prior to the Y2K scare and is now four to five years old.

Deployment Costs a Barrier

Most customers running older products are doing so because upgrading desktops is a risky and expensive proposition. Even when existing hardware can run current versions of Windows and Office, Microsoft estimates that the fully loaded labor cost to manually upgrade a desktop is approximately US$1,000. When the hardware also needs replacing, the cost may be even higher (although much of the cost of the new hardware may be offset by a reduction in upgrade problems; Intel and Avanade claim that desktop total cost of ownership starts rising when hardware is over three years old, and that the cheapest way to upgrade these systems is with a hardware refresh). Compounding the problem is that these upgrades can cause business disruptions and other expenses, such as the following:

• Application data or macros that are incompatible with newer versions of applications
• The risk that the upgrade process could lose desktop applications, configuration settings, or other locally stored data
• The need to retrain users and lowered productivity while users adjust to the new software.

Updated BDD Solution Accelerator

At the core of the initiative is an upgraded BDD Solution Accelerator. (Readers unfamiliar with Solution Accelerators should see the sidebar "What Are Solution Accelerators?".)

Two Upgrade Scenarios Supported

The accelerator is designed to support two major upgrade scenarios, both of which involve replacing the entire desktop system image (OS and applications) rather than performing in-place upgrades.

Light touch. In the light-touch scenario, technicians build CDs for each type of machine and desired system configuration. Installers boot each machine from the appropriate CD, which is programmed to save user settings to a server, image the hard drive with the new build, and restore user-specific settings on the upgraded PC. Microsoft and large partners such as Accenture believe that organizations can lower the labor cost into the US$350-per-desktop range with light-touch deployment.

Zero touch. In the zero-touch scenario, no desktop visit or user involvement is required unless the hardware requires replacing; everything is automated and performed remotely over the network with desktop management software. Under zero touch, all the labor is in planning, preparation, and dealing with failed upgrades; the incremental labor cost for a successful upgrade is zero. For customers with large numbers of managed desktops, Microsoft believes the allocated upfront labor costs can be driven down below US$100 per PC. When hardware replacement is needed, zero touch can still be used: low-cost laborers can remove the old system, physically unpack the new system, plug it into the network, and power it on. From that point on, everything is automatic: the new system comes up with the appropriate image and gets all the user settings from the PC it replaced.

Accelerator Separated into Two Editions

The new accelerator comes in two editions, which correspond roughly to the two upgrade scenarios:

BDD Standard. This edition prescribes a light-touch solution for organizations updating 25 to 500 PCs. It includes documentation and scripts that reference other Microsoft and third-party tools for inventorying existing applications and data on a PC and determining their compatibility with Windows XP and Office 2003, preparing a scripted installation or images for installing Windows XP, and capturing and restoring user-specific settings from an existing PC using an updated version of the Windows User State Migration Tool. (See the sidebar "Desktop Refresh Process".)

BDD Enterprise. This edition prescribes a zero-touch solution designed for organizations updating more than 500 PCs and that use Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003. It covers the same basic tasks as BDD Standard, but can offer higher levels of automation for refreshing existing PCs. It uses SMS 2003 with Service Pack 1 to inventory desktop hardware and software and select the appropriate image to deploy to a desktop. The just-released OS Deployment Feature Pack then enables SMS 2003 to push images based on the new Windows image format (WIM) out to desktops and install them automatically. Various settings and mappings needed during the upgrade process are stored in a SQL Server 2000 database.

Both editions of the BDD Accelerator (and the technologies they rely on) cover overall project planning and management, security, inventorying hardware and software, detecting and correcting application incompatibilities, infrastructure remediation (such as making sure the network and servers can support the workloads), user state migration, system imaging, image deployment, and application packaging.

Partner Benefits

Although Microsoft and its business customers are the primary beneficiaries of the BDD Accelerators, Microsoft’s partners also benefit.

Hardware vendors. The most likely candidates for desktop upgrades are systems installed before 2000. Computer manufacturers and component suppliers benefit if Microsoft can reduce costs and risks and thereby induce customers to upgrade.

Software vendors. Desktop software vendors have a much better opportunity to sell new or upgraded products once organizations decide to upgrade their PCs.

Service providers. Desktop upgrades are big projects that can generate substantial revenues for consultants and system integrators. These desktop upgrade projects are good outsourcing candidates since they happen infrequently and require skill sets that may not be needed for day-to-day operations. The BDD Accelerator provides guidance that helps service providers bid and execute these projects, and since the BDD is supported by Microsoft, service providers can work with Microsoft support to resolve problems.

Desktop Standards Are Key

Even though the BDD and the related Windows Desktop Deployment Resource Kit (from Microsoft Press) go a long way toward showing how to make desktop upgrades less costly and disruptive, these are big projects with lots of technical and logistical complexity.

The best results will be seen by large organizations that have a limited number of standardized desktops, with locked-down hardware and software configurations centrally managed using SMS 2003. Such organizations can plan and test for a smaller number of images, and then spread the lower upfront costs over a large number of desktops.

On the other hand, organizations with a free-for-all of user-managed systems and many different hardware platforms will have problems, although they can use the migration process as an opportunity to establish standards and impose centralized management and control of their desktops.

Resources

The new BDD Solution Accelerators are available at www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/dsd/bddoverview.mspx.

The BDD also references four free tools:

The new SMS 2003 OS Deployment Feature Pack can be found at www.microsoft.com/smserver/downloads/2003/osdfp.asp.

The Application Compatibility Toolkit 3.0 is available at www.microsoft.com/windows/appcompatibility/toolkit.mspx.

The Access 2003 Conversion Tool is available at www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003/journ/accessconvert.htm.

The new Windows User State Migration Tool version 2.6 is available at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4AF2D2C9-F16C-4C52-A203-8DAF944DD555&displaylang=en.