PCs bought before Y2K will be replaced in the next year or two,
depending on budgets, but users always complain about losing their
personalized desktops. Nothing chaps a manager like seeing high-priced
employees spend an hour or three reworking their screensavers,
shortcuts, file structure and family-photo backgrounds.
Miramar Systems (http://www.miramar.com) calls these settings the
desktop's DNA and claims they transfer these settings to a new computer
with little muss or fuss. So I talked to Joe Loobeek of United Defense
about his use of the product.
Joe's nine-member group handle 2,400 PCs for their division, including
480 applications. They use Novell servers and ZENworks for desktop
management. He had rejected a Miramar competitor and just started
evaluating Miramar's Desktop DNA migration tools when 550 PCs reached
end of life. So Joe threw Desktop DNA into production to handle that
project.
"We did the migration and had only one or two complaints from people who
didn't understand what would migrate," said Joe. "People usually need at
least thirty to sixty minutes to rework their PCs, and DNA cut that down
to five or ten minutes."
As you might expect looking at the size of the support team (nine)
compared to the number of desktops (2,400), Joe's group includes strict
rules about storing data on their Novell servers. They also cut their
losses chasing Windows weirdness by reformatting disks when a problem
can't be solved in about 30 minutes.
Being a NetWare user, Joe was happy about the recent partnership of
Miramar and Novell. "This gives us a level of confidence in the product,
and we know they won't go away in six months due to being a small
company," said Joe.
Pricing for the Desktop DNA Professional Migration Kit starts at $49
with multiple discount levels for volume users. If your company
accurately tracks tech time spent reloading Windows and the time it
takes to replace PCs, they will likely understand this costs less than
doing the job manually.
You may remember Miramar as the folks who produced many of the early PC
to Macintosh connection and conversion products over the past decade.
Those products include PC MacLAN for Windows 95/98/ME and NT/2K/XP as
well as DataViz Conversions Plus for PC to Mac file conversions.
Any company which could make early Macs and PCs coexist cleanly must
really understand desktop quirks.
James
