Windows 2000: Executing An Incremental Migration

Companies can migrate to Windows 2000 incrementally—move individual machines and departments to Windows 2000 while keeping their existing Windows NT 4.0 domain infrastructure intact—and get many of Windows 2000’s benefits. Among the benefits are better hardware support and greater reliability than Microsoft’s previous operating systems. However, to accurately assess Windows 2000’s costs against its benefits and to plan the migration, companies need to be aware of issues that could appear during the migration process. This article summarizes the major issues that may arise during incremental migration to Windows 2000 from three types of machines: Windows NT 4.0 workstations, Windows 95/98 workstations, and Windows NT 4.0 member servers.

This is the second article in a two-part series. In “Windows 2000: The Case for Incremental Migration” on page 3 of the Apr. 2000 Update, we defined the incremental migration phase of Windows 2000 migration; compared it to the later phases of migration in terms of complexity and support for various Windows 2000 advanced capabilities; and explored why companies might want to consider the incremental migration for workstations, Web servers, file and print servers, and terminal servers. For a brief summary of the first article, see the sidebar “What Is Incremental Migration and Why Consider It?“.