Best way to migrate user date when replacing many new Windows 7 computers

[bu7ch]

I've been using SCCM 2007 R2 for a few months and it's worked well for what we need it to do. We've done a lot of imaging successfully but our company has decided to refresh many computers very quickly. Most of these computers will be shipped to remote users and we only have a central site, 10 DPs and many small offices/home users. Since our SCCM had been set up by a consultant I did not have to learn much about USMT/MDT.

 

So here's where I have a question: What's the best way to deploy lots of computers while saving user data?

 

So far we image the computer at our corporate office but since the majority of users are going to be across the WAN we thought about using USMT when we ship the laptop to the user. We've already been told that we the users are not going to ship their old computer back to save their data. Is there a good way to script USMT or another migration tool?

 

Thanks

[AkumaUk]

Bu7ch,

 

You can create an SCCM task sequence to to capture user data to a central location or State Migration Points, which will run in the background with little impact. There are standard SCCM/MDT task sequences to help you.

 

However: There are lots of considerations to this approach unfortunately.

The first is you need to create the computer association in SCCM BEFORE you run the capture script if you want to use SCCM SMPs, which can be painful.

Secondly, if you run the Capture task sequence, how much time will have passed/what will have changed before you deploy the new system?

 

In a replace scenarios (which is what you're talking about, refresh is to rebuild the current machine) it's very difficult to co-ordinate the capture/replace of data when the user is remote. If you plan to send them the new laptop rather than visit, the only real thing you can do is communicate that documents & settings changed after X date will be lost unless stored somewhere on the network.

 

Otherwise, if a visit is possible, having a USB stick with USMT on it (with scripts or a batch file) can be used to 'quickly' migrate data between two machines.

It depends on the numbers you're talking about and the amount of local data you want to transfer as to which is more acceptable.

[bu7ch]

Thanks for the reply...Right now I don't have a number of computers that are replaced at sites with a DP. I just created the SMP for our primary site and trying to get the capture to work but I keep getting failures (I'll post the error below).

 

I've thought about doing the following, and some you mentioned:

 

1) At HQ, use capture/restore TS

2) Remote sites with DP - see #1

3) Remote sites without a BDP - create a script for using USMT to transfer the profile to new computer. Both new and old computers will be with the user so as long as they're on the network we think the script should be enough. Does anyone have a good example of this type of script (just so I don't reinvent the wheel)?

 

USMT Capture TS Failure:

 

My computer is my test. We have SCCM 2007 R3 SP2 on one server. I just found out about the hotifx to get the client to .2157 but that didn't help (both sccm and client are on the same client level now). The error I get in smsts.log is:

 

 

Failed to run the last action: Capture User State. Execution of task sequence failed.

The printer is out of paper. (Error: 8007001C; Source: Windows)

 

 

I found this link: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/configmgrosd/thread/a84df39d-dd55-4a88-a904-d046d358128c which has some of my issues but I still haven't gotten the capture TS to work. Unfortunately I'm a complete noob to this part so I could be doing something stupid. My computer is Windows 7 Ultimate SP1. Are there any required hotfixes/patches that I may have missed?