Windows OS Upgrade - Essay Example

In this process they have been continuously creating & releasing new versions of their products and managing obsolescence of their old products via seamless migration procedures. However, every migration comes at a huge cost to an organization and hence an in-depth analysis of business benefits, risks and return on investments should be carried out by the IT managers before a technology migration project should be proposed to the management. This paper presents a detailed comparison of windows XP with Windows Vista & Windows 2000 with Windows 2003 and the corresponding business benefits such that the management of Riordan Manufacturing can take a decision regarding the migration of their existing desktop and server operating systems to the most suitable next versions of Windows Desktop and Server OS.

Riordan Manufacturing has windows 2000 workstations and Windows 2000 servers in their network. Because of implied obsolescence of these two operating systems in the industry, the management of Riordan Manufacturing wants to upgrade their existing windows operating systems to the new versions of Windows that are most feasible for the business and can justify tangible return on investments. In this context, this paper presents an objective analysis of the new operating systems that can be the potential choice for deployment at Riordan Manufacturing.

Microsoft has been proactively releasing new pr. as been proactively releasing new products with the features that are not yet recognized by the business as potential enablers to enhance employee productivity and customer satisfaction. In this context, upgradation to the latest available version may be an over-kill. Also, upgradation of operating system invites a number of other parallel investments in terms of hardware capacity, application compatibility, user training, administration training, related software upgradation, peripheral upgradation, etc.

Hence, the new version of OS should have as much backward compatibility as possible to ensure that the related upgrades are minimized to as minimum as possible. The existing Windows operating systems and the future choices available for Riordan Manufacturing:The existing operating systems in Riordan manufacturing are Windows 2000 workstation and Windows 2000 server that have been very successful in the industry in meeting the business objectives of a variety of business domains. Given that Windows 2000 is an Active Directory Server based system, upgradation to Windows 2003 is seamless and an easy process.

Many organizations have been able to carry out such project within a weekend without the users knowing about the migrations. However, upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP or Windows Vista is not that easy because the change will be highly visible to the users and hence risk of reduction of user comfort levels & the corresponding reduction of user productivity is very high. Windows 2003 possesses enhancements of the features that are already built in Windows 2000 along with new technologies and features.

Hence, it makes lot of business sense to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003. However, transitioning directly to Windows 2008 may be quite a large