You've decided to upgrade to Windows XP and Office XP and have even mapped out the best deployment method for your organisation. Next, you must examine additional considerations, such as configuration approaches and print driver compatibility issues, before developing a detailed project plan and beginning the actual PC upgrade work. Choosing the Office bundle
Office XP comes in several flavors, but there are just two that will likely appeal to most organisations: Standard or Professional. The difference between the two is the inclusion of Access with the Professional suite. If Access not going to be widely used, I recommend sticking with the Standard suite. If you plan to have Office preinstalled from a manufacturer, your options are the Professional with Publisher or Small Business editions, both of which include Publisher in the suite. Click here for a list of participating manufacturers. Microsoft provides some assistance in selecting which suite will work best for your organisation. Reasons for a standard configuration
Development of a standard configuration for Windows XP and Office XP will need to take into account the business, technical, cultural, and regional requirements from the divisions within your office. The business or technical drivers are easy to address, the cultural ones aren't as easily resolved. These cultural issues include whether you should disable games, lock down the PC environment, and/or install multiple languages. Each of these issues could warrant its own article, but I believe that one simple motto can be used as a guiding principle for all such decisions: "Don't use technology to solve people problems." I favor having one base configuration that works for everybody, even if it may be overkill for some. For example, perhaps some clients need Microsoft Photo Editor or the Office Shortcut Bar, and others don't. For simplicity's sake, it's far easier to include all the components rather than create separate configurations based on varying client requirements. To Outlook or not to Outlook?
Despite what Microsoft would like us to believe, not everybody in the world is running Exchange for back-office messaging. Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise also factor into the mix. That's why I vote yes on installing Outlook, which can work well with both back-office systems. Microsoft recently released the Outlook 2002 Connector (for Notes), and Novell claims GroupWise 6.5 will provide "full" Outlook compatibility. Some or all of your clients may wish to use the functionality of Outlook, even when the organisation is not an Exchange shop. My recommendation is to include Outlook in your base configuration, even if its functionality is deferred to a future date. Dealing with overlapping projects
Adequate resources are key to successfully changing your organisation's operating system and office productivity suite. If there are a significant number of projects underway, those projects will likely compete for the limited pool of internal and external IT resources available. When faced with such a situation, your options are to find more (or different) resources, or reschedule the project to a more opportune time. When taking into account people resources, don't focus on only one portion of the team, such as the project manager. Consider help desk staff, trainers, testers, and communications specialists and allocate the necessary resources. Print driver incompatibility issues
A big integration hurdle revolves around print drivers for Windows NT/2000 that are incompatible with XP. All of the print servers throughout the organisation will need to be upgraded with new drivers. Before upgrading, it's a good idea to do a complete inventory of networked printers, cross-referenced by server. Once this is done, the arduous task of updating all print drivers across all the print servers must be undertaken. Interface issue with Citrix/Terminal server
If your organisation is using Citrix/Terminal Server, the user interface is either Windows NT or Windows 2000. There is no Windows XP client for Citrix. This means that clients accessing a Citrix environment will have a different interface than the default interface for their Windows XP desktop. Clients will either have to live with the differences or configure the XP desktop to appear as a Windows 2000 desktop if the two interfaces are too confusing.