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In today’s corporate environment, where personal computers and the applications they run provide the basis of production, consider what makes an individual (more) productive. A good PC with the requisite applications installed is only the beginning. In days past, end users were excited to get a new, faster PC; today, the average user experiences a healthy amount of anxiety and dread about giving up their old PC in favor of a new one. The old PC has become a trusted friend, a companion accommodating of their preferences and tendencies. Taking it away from them is like taking away a carpenter’s favorite hammer or an outfielder’s tried-and-true baseball mitt. The new one may be “better,” but the old one fits their hand, it’s perfectly broken in. The new one will take some time before it is as useful as the old.
Consider some of the following:
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How many bookmarks does the average user have to key information on the intranet or internet? |
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How many folders do they have set up in their e-mail client, just the way they like them? |
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How many additions to their spell-checker or dictionary do they have? |
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Do the accounting people all have different spreadsheet macros for their individual tasks? |
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Do secretaries and administrative assistants have unique word processor templates or mail-merge macros? |
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Is the user left-handed? |
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Do they like a particular screen resolution or larger icons to accommodate their eyesight? |
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How many critical files are stored locally on end user systems? |
Even in the face of corporate policies requiring network storage for business data, there is always a considerable amount stored locally in any environment, especially considering laptop usage and local e-mail stores. Further, while other settings such as a user’s wallpaper or screen saver may not be considered important to network administrators or management, how long will end users spend searching for the old ones? And the list could go on and on. The point is: the “personality” of a user’s system is an integral part of their productivity, and as such, a corporate asset.
In order to make their environment more productive, most users spend considerable time customizing their PCs and applications. Considerable IT staff time has probably also gone into helping make that end-user as productive as possible. While the user may be able to tell you about the changes they have made to their PC, how much do they know about the other configuration changes that may have been made by IT staff? And how practical is it to get every IT staff person who may have contributed to that PC’s configuration back again when you need to upgrade it?
In a corporate environment, having even one experienced IT staff member interview each user for personal requirements, and hand-move all data and settings for every new PC is simply not practical. In truth, most companies hire temporary employees to roll out PCs and deal with the internal ‘bad press,’ associated productivity loss, and data loss of traditional PC rollout methods as a matter of course. What if you could gather the corporate knowledge about your PC environment, and use software to perform an ‘intelligent examination’ of each PC for you?
A Better Way to deploy PCs
System Suitcase is designed to search for PC settings, application settings, and data, and store them so they can be retrieved to the new PC. System Suitcase works even if you are upgrading the desktop OS from Windows 95/98 to Windows NT/2000 at the same time, or just applying a ‘clean image’ to an existing PC! The IT staff in your company can configure what moves, and what doesn’t, from a central location. Create a plan including what settings and data should move, and System Suitcase will do the work for you. Far beyond a simple file copy, System Suitcase lets your IT staff build a profile of application settings and data to be moved. It’s the next best thing to having all of those ‘in-house experts’ back at each PC again.
How it works
System Suitcase is installed to a publicly accessible location on your corporate network. Once installed, your IT staff can use the Suitcase Administrator tool to configure what PC settings, application settings and data should move – this is referred to as your Travel Plan. After making these choices, the next step is to transfer the users settings and data up to the network for safekeeping – we call this ‘Packing’ the PC. After you have deployed the new PC, you can then retrieve the ‘Packed’ settings and data to the new machine – this is the referred to as ‘Unpacking.’ The whole process, from old to new, is referred to as a ‘Trip.’ Depending upon your requirements, the entire Trip process can be done without physically visiting a single PC.
What should we take along on the Trip?
At the heart of a System Suitcase Trip is the Travel Plan, which defines what will move from the old PC to the new. Travel Plans contain information about PC and user based settings, as well as technical information for the program, such as where the users’ ‘Suitcase’ of Packed data should be located. You may wish to have different Travel Plans for different departments or groups, or you may just make one for your entire organization – either way, System Suitcase is flexible enough for any size organization and any business model. Configuration options in the Travel Plan let you decide which desktop and network settings will move, and also what application-based settings and data you wish to move. The settings and data that will be moved for an application are contained in a ‘Suitcase Script’. System Suitcase comes with a selection of pre-made Suitcase Scripts for applications such as MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and many more. Any of these scripts can be included in your Travel Plans, and you can create new Suitcase Scripts for custom applications or other uses.
As you can see, System Suitcase is the most powerful tool available for deploying PCs on you network
On behalf of the entire staff at Adesso Technolgies, thanks for choosing System Suitcase!
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New Web site streamlines purchase of System Suitcase desktop migration tool.
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This calculator will help you determine the savings you will realize when you include System Suitcase 2.1 as your desktop system management tools.
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When packing a PC and performing a wild card search, the pack processing time is dramatically reduced if the temporary internet files on the source PC are deleted prior to the pack. More
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