A smart move by Microsoft
Customers will not be able to directly upgrade Windows 2000 to Windows Vista. Rather, they will have to back up everything and format. To quote BetaNews:
While Windows 2000 Professional customers may purchase a cheaper “upgrade” copy of Microsoft next-generation operating system, Windows Vista must be “clean installed,” which means users will need to back up their files and data manually and then copy everything into place. Applications will also need to be re-installed.
Another possible use case for Ubuntu and migration-assistant. To put this into perspective, according to a random, unverified website I found on Google, Windows 2000 makes up 6.74% of the operating system market.
August 5th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
What you do is even more important than you think! Thank you for that.
You can check this study (registration required) on the usage of various OS in companies
If you don’t want to register and can read french, you can look at this comment of the study
Basicaly the number you cited correspond to the computer which are used to regulary surf on the net, while nearly half of companies computer use in fact windows 2000.
It’s because those computer are almost always used on the intranet even if they have an access to the internet (think of the computers used in store to search the availability of products, and the like).
Now it mostly affect big companies, nonetheless the problem risen by this announcement is rather huge in scope, so the use case for your project is much more important
Maybe you could try to contact an information system director in such a company to know the method they use to upgrade their computer (image disk, or whatever).
Perhaps you could find interesting opportunities that way :p
August 6th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Hei!
Nice tool you are making here. This really need to be taking care of.
My two cents>
Make sure the outlook import goes flawless (E-mail is OK, but I am thinking more of Contacts, Tasks, Calender…).
Thinking about the fact that many admins move hundreds machines at a time it would probably be a good idea to consider making some integration tool for your work through samba… webbased or something. The easiest and more automatized… the better. Maybe I could help out testing that one in the future.
Keep up your good work, and good luck with your project!
Hubuntu
August 7th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Thanks for the comments!
I will definitely do whatever I can to make this software more appealing for business users. Specifically, after regular email accounts import into Evolution without issue, I’ll work towards getting the Evolution Data Server items (tasks, calender, etc) importing.
I work during the school year within my University’s information technology department, which is just finishing up a move from Novell to Windows-based network services. This should give me an opportunity to study other ways in which we can make the transistion easier, as was suggested.
For businesses with many machines, if the data is stored locally and not in Active Directory, the administrator can automate the process by using preseeding to import the same selection for each machine.