Migration Day 1

That the mid-week training sapped preparation time from me is true but I really can't lay the entire blame on today's situation on that. I like having all the i's dotted but I missed a few too many things this time. While the consultant with me wasted no time, today was more work than it should have been. Considering all that thought on preparation, I should not have had to spend hours updating some computers today. I had requested from staff for a few pieces of information, namely whether they were running Outlook 2000. A few people responded and I took care of them by updating them to the latest Office service pack. I really had no excuse not going one-by-one but simply trusted that everyone else was on Outlook 2003. Today I discovered that some people didn't even have XP SP2 installed. I knew all these problems existed and yet I still let it slip. I get very upset at inefficiencies by my own hand. There's just no excuse when I've been thinking and writing about this stuff for so long.

The migration went fine regardless. We moved Exchange control to the new server and the other new server took over as domain controller. The Symantecs (Backup Exec and Antivirus) were setup and deployed. Tomorrow I brave the storm and head over to rewire, transfer files, implement rights, move staff into a new OU with group policy, and rework a login script. If I have the time or energy I would like to setup each user's desktop so on Tuesday there is very little hysteria.

Compared to the NT 4.0 to 2000 migration I experienced a few years ago, this was a breeze. That was a week-long nightmare, this will be a couple of days and so far nothing is broken. Should have been breezier though. But at least some of the problem desktop issues also got handled today. Guess I needed that day without staff and a little confrontation with my weaknesses.