Industry voice: How to succeed in a late-stage OS migration

If your company is late to upgrading its OS, you are not alone. More than 20 percent of US companies are yet to upgrade from the aging Windows XP. But there are ways you can turn tardiness to an advantage.

Most of the risks of remaining on an unsupported Windows XP system have been widely discussed in the public sphere, as business systems are vulnerable to viruses, malware and hacks. And Microsoft's extension of anti-malware support until July 2015 won't be enough to protect your systems.

XP exploits will likely begin to emerge en masse within the coming months. The millions of computers on which XP is still installed are simply too tempting a target. What's more, on an old OS your business won't have access to the latest apps or software, with all the attendant frustrations and productivity issues this implies.

If you're already coming late to migration you have no choice; you need to do it now. Don't compound the problem by waiting any longer. With the latest developments on automated systems, OS migration can be undertaken much more quickly than you think.

Plan your migration strategy in advance, clearly setting out your objectives, costs and time goals. What are the risks? Will migration impact users, and how? It might sound obvious, but it's incredible how many companies I see that make their migration strategy up as they go along, especially those who have never undertaken a large-scale migration before. As a result, timescales and KPIs tend to drift.

As well as making your migration efforts more credible within the business, this form of planning will also be incredibly helpful to you as an IT professional. I guarantee, while doing your research, you'll learn something about the process that probably would have tripped you up later on.

Understand which applications are required and how critical they are; how much are they actually used and what does each application cost the business? Understand if applications can be upgraded or repackaged or if a new, similar application can be found. Make sure you involve users in decisions to keep or 'rationalise-out' certain applications though.

IT teams can frequently underplay this stage of the migration process and underestimate the time, complexity and overall challenge involved in rationalising apps effectively, and the cost of getting it wrong. It's often best to call in outside help to undertake your application audit, whether in the form of consulting or automated application rationalisation tools.

Migration of an OS is no time to discover you have fundamental infrastructure issues, but this is just the way it has played out for many. In fact, an OS rollout can cause companies to take the first good, hard look at their systems for a while. However, finding these faults during the migration can cause the process to draw out, adding further expense.

Make sure you perform some basic sanitation issues up-front. Ensure you have applied all the most current updates to all systems. Also, ensure your system management infrastructure has minimal failure points so it doesn't become a bottleneck. It will need to have the capacity to provide deployment services and desktop management in parallel.

Many companies manually ship disks and USBs to departments, and/or eat up time with numerous costly desk-side visits in order to upgrade individual computers. This annoys users, disrupts work, and pulls IT staff away from important duties.

Ensuring rollouts occur effectively and efficiently is the quickest way to be seen as an IT hero within your organisation.

Given the technology that is available, aim for 100% 'Zero Touch Windows Migration'. 1E, for example, is typically able to achieve 100% Zero-Touch on 90% of a computer estate during a migration, with very limited interaction required on the remaining 10%. OS rollout is almost completely automated across the network with minimal desk-side visits from the IT department.

Migration is not about OS, but about people. Your job is to give staff the tools that will allow them to do their job effectively.

Your migration should also be totally non-disruptive. Encourage user buy-in to the upgrade process by letting them schedule when automated upgrades occur, and ensure you are clear about the benefits it will bring and when it needs to be done by.

After migration, consider setting up an app store, or another way of allowing users to request applications and upgrades in a way that lets them feel in control of the process and timing.

If you're undertaking an ultra-late stage migration, one thing is strongly in your favour; the ability to see the mistakes everyone else has made, and avoid them.

Whether problems with application mapping or device drivers, you'll see some very common problems out there, often experience by IT professionals who, perhaps understandably, will never have undertaken a large-scale migration before.

Scour the forums, talk to other IT professionals, and consult with experts. At this point in time the industry will have a broader view of the issues involved. Turn this to maximum advantage.

If you're migrating from XP, trust us, your next OS isn't going survive 13 years like XP did! The rate at which Windows releases a new OS is speeding up. Many companies hadn't even got onto Windows 7 or 8 when Windows 9 was announced.

Think about how you can implement more robust, efficient processes for the rollout of OSs and rationalisation of applications. As before, the best solution is to automate your migration processes as much as possible, putting in place systems that will make your next migration that much smoother.

Ambareesh Kulkarni is Vice President of Professional Services at 1E.

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How Apple's iWatch can succeed where others have failed

Sarah Tew

I've reviewed tons of smartwatches. Or so it seems. And yet, I don't see many people wearing them. That's because the whole wearable landscape is embryonic. And, a lot of it's not very good.

By very good, I mean good of the type I'd recommend to my mom or my friend who's not into tech. Good as in, you need one of these. Or you'd want one. I can count on one hand the number of wearables that have gotten to that stage, and I wouldn't use all five fingers.

Smartwatches have come in many shapes and sizes: some have black and white screens. Some are big, bright and curved. Some run their own apps. Some have no apps at all. Some work with just Android. Others, iOS and Android. Some track fitness. Some do it better than others.

I had a list of what I was looking for in a killer wearable, Apple or otherwise, well over a year ago. A lot of my opinions there still stand. But now, as Apple might finally be ready to show off something big next week, how can it -- watch, band, or otherwise -- improve on what's out there?

Here's a good start.

Sarah Tew

Smartwatches and wearables aren't necessary. They're additional gadgets in a world already flooded with gadgets. We don't need them. People need phones. People need computers. Tablets found a way to succeed to by doing some things so well that there was a desire to get one. It's the iPad equation: at first people called Apple's iPad a large iPhone. But it started up fast, had long battery life, and was a lot more portable than a laptop, and had a big screen.

What would a wearable do better than a phone or tablet or laptop? Track health? Pay for things? Stay connected with friends? It has to have its own purpose. Amazingly, beyond "act as a pager" or "count steps," most smartwatches right now don't.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Good-looking watches are one thing; a design that helps the wearable be good at what it does is far more important. Most watches go for flair: a curved screen, or a round face and super-thin bezel, or some premium material design. Do any of these make the wearable better at what it does? Sure, wristwatches are about design more than function. But when it comes to a killer smartwatch, I don't think it should work that way. MacBooks and iPads and iPhones are really well designed, but they're mostly practically designed: they function. I don't want a fancy look if it doesn't make sense.

Smartwatches are slaves to smartphones. They're glorified Bluetooth accessories. They can offer an on-wrist way to interact with stuff without checking your phone all the time, like on Google's Android Wear watches such as the Moto 360, but what about when you walk into a store, or an airport, or around your home?

Phones manage the relationship between smartwatches and other smart things and locations right now, but these wearables need to get smarter about where they are and what they're doing all on their own. Maybe, someday soon, we'll be in a world of connected things. Smartwatches should be ready to work with them and save us the extra drain on our phone.

Josh Miller/CNET

Android Wear watches last about a day on a charge. The Pebble Steel and Meta M1, four to seven days. Most fitness bands, about a week. A few go for months, but have standard watch batteries.

It's a lot to ask for a small device to have killer battery life, but having yet another little thing to charge up is a gift that no one I know cherishes. At the least, Apple's smartwatch or wearable will hopefully have a better, smarter way to conserve battery life, or recharge on the fly, or fast and effortlessly enough that it will remain functional. But some reports say that might not be the case. Maybe battery life on these types of devices just isn't ready to take the next step.

Wearables are meant to be worn all the time. The more they need recharging, the less they're worn, and the sooner they end up in a pile of discarded electronics.

Why does a wearable have to be a watch? Why can't it be more? The 2011 iPod Nano unclipped from a watchband and could be snapped on a jacket. It could be an accessory or a watch. Having something that could be swapped into different accessories with different styles, perform different functions in different situations, and be more of a universal multi-use mini-gadget...I'd far prefer that to any true watch.

Hundreds of accessory makers, fashion companies, and others could turn a flexible little device into a gadget with dozens of designs and forms. And it would make a lot more sense than creating a smartwatch with different physical shapes. The Misfit Shine is an activity tracker that takes this approach and succeeds: as a watch, necklace, or clip-on.

Sarah Tew

Google's Android Wear will transform rapidly over time: new features and improvements, and compatible apps, are certain to make it better six months from now than it is now. But right now, it feels like a beta test. It doesn't do everything I want. Parts don't work reliably. It's fragmented.

If an Apple wearable debuts now, better to start small and do a few things really, really well. If those few things are great, and well-delivered, others can be introduced later. The iPhone didn't start with an App Store. But it had polished software for what it did right out of the gate.

Most fitness wearables right now are, honestly, more of a carrot on a stick than a true way to improve daily fitness. Step-counting bands have limits as motivational tools. Heart-rate monitors on many recent smartwatches like Samsung's are buggy. Connected health-tracking hubs, like Withings, offer some good tools but don't always play well with everything else out there.

If Apple can make a hub via Health and Healthkit that allows shared and exchanged health-tracking data between other accessories and apps, and senses your health and fitness more continuously, and with better software coaching, there could finally be something worth getting beyond basic fitness bands.

I have other hopes, too, like a way to make secure payments from my wrist, but just nailing these would help Apple, and the whole wearable tech industry, take a much-needed leap forward. Otherwise, for now, the outlook still currently feels stuck in beta.

Tune in to our live blog of Apple's September 9 event to find out more: we'll be there.

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