I ve been thinking long and hard about this. I believe that the SBS 2008 Migration Wizard is incorrectly named. Therein lies a major problem. Microsoft have trained us to become accustomed to wizards doing all the right things for them. They’ve trained us to believe that if we follow the wizard that we can put our brain into idle mode and let the system do the rest for us. BZZZZTTT WRONG.
In reality, the SBS 2008 Migration wizard cannot do that. It NEVER could given the wide variety of issues that can and will occur in real world scenarios. The SBS team could not possibly predict all the things that could arise and therefore could not write a wizard to do EVERYTHING for you. That my friends is where we earn our money. That is where we define ourselves from the DIY dude or the local computer shop that “thinks” they know how to do it just because they can run the wizards. This is not “So simple Robbie can do it…” (no offence to Robbie either).
Therefore I propose an idea. An idea that we the community can help with. It’s a simple idea and one that if we adopt it as a community, will help resolve the confusion. Heck – some bright spark at Microsoft might even agree with me. The idea is this “Let s STOP calling it a wizard”. Call it the SBS 2008 Migration Walkthrough. In essence that is really what it is. It does do “some” automation of a number of the tasks, but it is NOT A WIZARD. Get the message out that it is a walkthrough that provides automation of SOME tasks and prescriptive guidance for other tasks. Stop calling it a wizard and start calling it what it really is a walkthrough. I think that if we all could refine / change our terminology a little that it will REALLY help us all understand that this process is NOT insanely hard, but deserves much more respect than a simple wizard does. With proper reading of the documentation and following the steps you can get a repeatable result that will migrate you to SBS 2008.
Let’s NOT call it a Walthrough. Call it a Methodology, or a Framework. And let’s make sure we precede it with “Microsoft”, since there will be others.
There’s more we can do (really, MUST do). Let’s also create a repository of GOTCHAs. As you said, no framework can account for all the aberrations we see in the field. As we encounter each GOTCHA, we need to add to the Framework.
What to look for? When to look for it (what step in the MS Framework)? How to resolve the aberration?
I nominate Wayne to do this work.
Jim Maher