Windows 2000: The Case for Incremental Migration

Windows 2000 promises higher reliability, and lower total cost of ownership for Windows-based networks. However, the technology that provides many of these benefits, Active Directory, can require months of effort to redesign security architectures, upgrade network infrastructure, and retrain administrators. Companies that migrate to Windows 2000 incrementally—workgroups deploy it on individual workstations and servers without Active Directory—get some immediate payoffs, without conducting a costly design project and without jeopardizing a fuller migration later. This article outlines the benefits of incremental migration and summarizes some of its costs and risks.

Introduction

Much of Microsoft’s early marketing and documentation for Windows 2000 focused on features for reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Among these features are Group Policy, which allows a company to define and enforce standard settings for groups of users and machines, and Intellimirror, a set of technologies for synchronizing an individual user’s applications, settings, and files across multiple PCs. Windows 2000 also promises to let companies vastly simplify their security architecture, reducing the cost of adding, deleting, or moving large numbers of users.