Next Steps
The process outlined in this document should produce an application catalog for your organization that is prioritized in terms of testing required, specific user roles, and which applications will be deployed with Windows 7. This catalog gives you the raw information needed to progress to the next steps in the process. Using the information in your application catalog, your next steps should include:
After you understand the scope of work involved in your organization, you will need to organize a team to work through both the technical and business decisions that need to be made. The size and scope of this team is dependent on the size and scope of your deployment. It may be that you are the project manager, test lead, and general go-to resource. Larger organizations will need a more formal team with well-defined roles. Guidance for putting together a team can be found in the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 Update 1. You can find more information on creating deployment project teams in the Plan, Build, and Deploy Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=150921).
Decide which applications will be officially supported after the deployment. This gives you the option of placing some of the older, little-used applications in the category of unsupported applications. These programs typically receive “best-effort” support from your IT department with no assurance of compatibility.
Create a test plan for the applications that will require testing. You should plan to test your role-based images as well, because some application compatibility issues may only emerge in combination with other applications.
Create a test lab in which to perform application compatibility testing. Very often, this will be the same lab used to perform testing on the deployment images. Consider using virtualization software such as Microsoft Virtual PC 2009 or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 as an alternative to dedicated computers for the bulk of application testing to reduce hardware cost.
Identify applications that have compatibility issues and find the correct remediation. Test the remediation to ensure that the issues are actually corrected. The ACT contains information on compatibility issue remediation in its documentation.
Identify members of your pilot deployment test group. You should pick people that represent each major role within your organization so that you can get valuable feedback on each role-based image being deployed. Consider the place of upper management in the pilot group. Some executives that are technically savvy may elect to dedicate a computer to pilot testing.
Sign off on application compatibility for the operating system deployment. Your organization may or may not employ a formal sign-off procedure to mark completion of each project milestone, but the application compatibility team’s involvement is just one part of the overall operating system deployment project.
Deploy the operating system and applications to the organization.
There may be other tasks involved as well, depending on your organization’s needs and culture. The decisions you make regarding the priority of applications and testing may be affected by the structure of your organization as well. For example, you may want to add a step to reevaluate the list of applications to be deployed with the operating system to see if there are new applications that should be added.
These further steps are discussed in greater depth in other documentation such as Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 Update 1. See the Additional References section that follows for further information.