PCmover saves healthcare organizations like yours up to $300 on hard and soft IT costs

Simplicity turned out to be a very important factor for selecting the right product performing this large scale migration. “We needed a solution that allowed the company’s employees to migrate their own data without a support technician’s assistance,” the project manager said. The company wanted software that would be easily configured, intuitive, and not require a technical expert to oversee each person’s progress, globally. A manual migration would be too complicated and is typically not as thorough or time-effective as an automated migration solution.

Additional requirements were the following:

• Simple and intuitive to use, without the use of XML;
• Highly scalable to support up to 100,000 PCs;
• Supports multiple Windows OS versions;
• A proven solution for Enterprise-grade scenarios.

A big concern was how the PC deployment would impact employee’s productivity. In case of a manual migration, the possibility that not all of the old PC’s files, settings or even applications would successfully migrate was very high. With that, employees would then spend unnecessary time to manually search for files, settings and other things and would have to download and reinstall applications needed to do their job. All of that could also turn into increased support time provided by the respective help-desk/technical support, adding to non-productive times and negative impact to their bottom line.

In prior migration projects, whether for hardware refreshes or in-place upgrades, the company used the User State Migration Tool™ (USMT) from Microsoft®. However, for this project, USMT wasn’t the right fit since it does not support a migration of applications.

Without all critical applications being migrated over, many employees could not continue to complete their daily tasks. The company would also have to factor in the additional cost of the media replacement.

Also, USMT requires advanced XML expertise on an ongoing basis, and offers limited customization, even to those with the technical capabilities. The cost of hiring an XML expert to configure this process is substantial, especially considering the global footprint of this project. Finally the time frame of a migration of this magnitude could have gone on for an extended period of time, ultimately costing the company unnecessary resources.

The solution the company chose was Laplink PCmover Enterprise. PCmover enabled them to complete this massive migration without losing data and applications, even the specialized, less common ones that many of the company’s employees used. This contributed early on to upper management’s approval of the PCmover solution.

Additionally, PCmover’s simple “wizard” interface was a plus. Instead of subjecting employees worldwide to a huge, unwieldy directory to view their migrated data, PCmover requires no technical expertise, works straight out of the box, and displays the information in a simple, easy-to[1]understand format. Employees worldwide experienced uninterrupted productivity by using PCmover Enterprise.

Using PCmover Enterprise over solutions like USMT, the company saved the tremendous cost of hiring a team of XML specialists to oversee the global PC migration process. For users already running a newer version of Windows, the ability to use PCmover without reconfiguration to migrate to the latest version of Windows was a considerable advantage compared to the alternatives.