13 March 2008 13 Comments

Workstation Migration Assistant 1.0 RC1

Well, it’s been in development for quite some time, but I’m finally happy enough with the feedback from both my own company and external testers to make a more public release.

Please note that this IS a release candidate and as such, may be prone to a few bugs that have yet to be discovered. Rest assured however, that both myself and a 20-strong test team have been battering this for the past while so I’m confident that there’s no *major* bugs.

There’s a ReadMe file included, I *do* advise that you read that first before contacting me about problems. If you still think that you’ve got a valid query or have found a bug, please let me know.

Changelog and download link are in the Workstation Migration Assistant section

Dan

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13 Responses to “Workstation Migration Assistant 1.0 RC1”

  1. B Jackson 13 March 2008 at 7:53 pm #
    Thanks for the hard work this must have been to put together, I look forward to testing this.
    Reply
  2. Richard 27 March 2008 at 6:23 pm #
    Nice looking and very handy bit of work, I look forward to testing it out.
    Reply
  3. Tom 29 March 2008 at 3:48 pm #
    Seems like a great idea and the tool looks nice, however not having much success with Office 2007 settings migration. Although it could be I’m not configuring it right.
    Reply
  4. Tom 29 March 2008 at 3:50 pm #
    On second consideration, I think the Office 2007 issue may have been an activation issue.
    Reply
  5. Randy 2 April 2008 at 5:22 pm #
    Dan,
    Will this run from within WinPE 2.0?
    Sorry if this had been stated earlier somewhere and I missed it.
    Thanks,
    Randy
    Reply
  6. Myton Lopez 3 April 2008 at 12:29 am #
    Correct me if I am wrong, but in order to run this GUI you need to install USMT on each computer to run the scanstate/loadstate?

    From your ReadMe.rtf

    Installation and configuration

    • Extract the files to a local folder. Please note that WMA does NOT work from a network-location due to .NET security restrictions

    Reply
  7. Phil Wiffen 3 April 2008 at 8:35 am #
    Dan, thanks for producing this. Now I just need to find the time to test-drive it! :)
    Reply
  8. Dan 3 April 2008 at 1:49 pm #
    Randy: No, USMT will not work under WinPE 2.0 and either with WMA as it relies on the .NET framework.

    Myton: You know, I hadn’t thought about that. Technically, no, USMT doesn’t need to be installed, WMA does have to be copied somewhere locally though. So you can copy USMT and WMA files to a Temp folder and run. I’ll look into fixing this .NET security issue – there MUST be some workaround to get WMA running from a network location.

    Reply
  9. Myton Lopez 4 April 2008 at 1:56 am #
    Yeah if you can run the WMA from a network share that would be optimal. I have the WMA copied to a flashdrive and everytime I launch it prompts that a USB drive is detected and if I want to use it for the migration process and I say no because there is not enough room on the flash drive to save the data to it. It than goes on and gives me a warning unable to find the USMT installation C:\Program Files\USMT301\scanstate or something like that but give me the option to install the USMT and it downloads and saves the InstallUSMT301_x86.msi to my flash drive and installs the USMT on the computer. I had ran the scanstate and loadstate and on the 4 laptops I tested it downloaded and installed the USMT when testing the scanstate and loadstate.
    Reply
  10. Myton Lopez 5 April 2008 at 1:09 am #
    Hi Dan,

    I was able to get WMA to work without downloading the USMT and also got it to work on my flash drive without it giving me that prompt. I haven’t tried using WMA from a network share yet with the cmd you mentioned. I was thinking about creating a batch file to run it and will test next week for I am ready to leave and go home. By the way on an older computer I got an error launching WMA for the Net Framework version on the laptop was not at least a certain version. Might want to add that to the prerequisites for running the WMA. I really like the MailSend option of the success or failure scanstate and loadstate. I also like the health check feature for I had booted up a laptop that must have shutdown improperly and it flagged it…I thought that was pretty cool. Keep up the good work.

    Myton

    Reply
  11. Ian Fraser 9 April 2008 at 8:54 am #
    Hi Dan

    I’ve developed a similar HTA for USMT migration but it executes capture and restore on the target machine remotely. This allows a helpdesk to manage this without visiting the users desktop. I used some sysinternals tools for the remote execution – (psexec, pskill) and it,s managed via a GUI.

    I used cs.ini to manage the machine variables for the capture path.

    Is the remote execution something that you would consider adding to your tool?

    Cheers

    Ian

    Reply
  12. Henry Wright 27 January 2009 at 7:33 pm #
    During our recent pc deployment I believe that your tool or something similar ( Ibelieve it was your migration tool) was used. Excellent application and I expected to more information and purchase the tool for other uses. Keep up the great work
    Reply

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    [...] for Dan Cunningham to finally release his Workstation Migration Assistant — and today he has! The Workstation Migration Assistant is a visual wrapper for Microsoft’s User State Migration Tool, designed to simplify the [...]

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