Moving to a new OS requires planning—strategic and tactical. Before you can complete a strategic plan to migrate your existing Windows NT network to Windows 2000 (Win2K), you must understand Win2K's strengths and weaknesses. Win2K's many delays (by the time this article publishes, the OS will have had the largest number of product delays in Microsoft's history) aren't reason enough to postpone migration. After all, the tweaks Microsoft made to the product during these delays presumably improved the OS.
For tactical information about migrating to Win2K, see "Related Articles in Previous Issues," page 86. For strategic information, including 10 reasons why you should migrate to Win2K, 10 reasons why you should wait to migrate, and how long to wait, read on.
10 REASONS TO MIGRATE
1. No other choice
Like it or not, Win2K is coming. Because Microsoft's revenues depend on upgrades to its customers' installed base, the company will eventually stop supporting NT 4.0. Your alternatives to installing Win2K are to continue using NT 4.0 without any more bug or security fixes, or tear out your existing NT network and install UNIX or Linux.
2. Kerberos security
Kerberos is a network authentication protocol that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed to transmit data across nonsecure networks. Kerberos and Active Directory (AD) are the two enabling technologies that make Win2K so different from NT 4.0. Kerberos has several advantages over NT LAN Manager (NTLM), NT 4.0's authentication protocol. One prominent advantage is Kerberos' ability to form transitive, rather than NT 4.0's nontransitive, trusts. An easy way of explaining a transitive trust is to say that if you trust your parents, and your parents trust the Joneses next door, then you trust the Joneses. This Kerberos feature is what lets Win2K create domain trees and forests. Another advantage of Kerberos is mutual authentication, which causes the server and client to verify their partner's authenticity. This feature eliminates NT Workstation 4.0's susceptibility to man-in-the-middle attacks from systems posing as servers.
3. Public key infrastructure
Win2K incorporates public key infrastructure (PKI) security features. PKI is a system of digital certificates and Certificate Authorities (CAs) that, like Kerberos, let both parties in a transaction check each other's authenticity and encrypt the transaction. PKI is the security system best suited for the Internet and therefore is useful for secure e-commerce between businesses. The U.S. Postal Service is using PKI to give customers 24-hour Internet access to postage. Although PKI isn't yet mature, its inclusion in Win2K foretells groundbreaking integration of security levels and encryption into daily business tasks.
4. SOHO features
Although Microsoft has concentrated publicity on Win2K's enterprise performance and scaled the OS to 32 processors, Win2K also provides several features for the small office/home office (SOHO) environment. The OS has a competent router and supports a demand-dial interface, so traffic that routes to a modem interface causes the modem to automatically dial an ISP. Features such as Internet Connection Sharing in Windows 2000 Server (Win2K Server) and Windows 2000 Professional (Win2K Pro) let multiple users on the network use the system's Internet connection. Internet Connection Sharing uses Network Address Translation (NAT), in which the router (i.e., the server) takes traffic between the local network and the Internet and translates the traffic from multiple local nodes to one network IP address, as the ISP expects. This process lets the ISP see multiple users on the local network as one (busy) user. (For more about NAT, see Zubair Ahmad, "Windows 2000's Network Address Translation," page 141.)
5. Enterprise focus
Microsoft is squarely focused on the enterprise-scale, mission-critical server market. Win2K has SMP enhancements that let the OS scale to more than four processors in a more linear fashion than NT 4.0 did. In addition, Windows 2000 Datacenter Server (Datacenter) competes with UNIX boxes that support as many as 32 processors and 64GB of physical memory.
6. Thin built in
Win2K Server offers Terminal Services as a service right out of the box. This feature is useful for accessing remote servers as though you're logged on to the system console. After I used the Terminal Services client to remotely access my Win2K systems for a few weeks, I missed the service's presence on my NT 4.0 systems. To obtain equivalent Terminal Services features on an NT 4.0 network, you need to rebuild and relicense every server with NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (WTS). In most cases, this task isn't practical.
7. Hooks for big storage
Microsoft recognizes the growth of data storage and NT's weakness in this area. Win2K addresses this weakness with quota management, hierarchical storage management (called Remote Storage Service—RSS), dynamic volume management, and improvements in NTFS. Many of these features use technology Microsoft licensed from third-party vendors. In most cases, Win2K employs a basic implementation of a technology—enough to pique your interest and perhaps make you try the technology for a small job. But to use a feature's most powerful implementation, you must go to the third-party vendor whose product integrates into Win2K's new storage-management APIs. For example, Win2K's Logical Disk Manager is a simple version of VERITAS Software's VERITAS Volume Manager, and the OS's disk defragmenter is a manual version of Executive Software's Diskeeper.
8. Windows 2000 on the road
Win2K Pro is the most useful notebook OS I've used. The OS's functionality and flexibility beats Windows 98's, hands down. Win2K Pro's offline files feature lets you mark network files and folders for offline use. The OS then creates a local cache and keeps the files and folders synchronized with the originals in the background. This feature is like a Briefcase with brains—if you keep your working documents on a server share for the virus-scanning and regular-backup benefits, just mark the directory for offline use and take it with you. Win2K Pro also has a hibernate function that writes all the contents of physical memory to a hibernate file before shutting the power off, thereby saving the system's state. The hibernating system uses virtually no power and takes about 15 seconds to hibernate and 45 seconds to restore on a 366MHz Pentium II processor. However, the system won't hibernate if a network file is open, even if you've marked the file for offline storage.
To make hopping on and off a corporate network even easier, you can configure the OS to show the local area connection (i.e., your network card) as an icon in the system tray. When you connect to a network and establish a link, a callout balloon appears to show that you're connected and at what speed. Switching locations is as simple as disconnecting the network cord, putting the notebook in standby or hibernate mode, and plugging the notebook in to a different network cable. All these features give you peace of mind when you travel and need files within easy reach.
9. Distributed administration
You can finally start the process of pushing account and resource administration closer to users. In Win2K, domains are no longer units of administration; they're units of replication and security. Organizational units (OUs) are the new units of administration. You can create a hierarchy of OUs that delegates a subset of administration down to the workgroup level. However, just because you can create an OU hierarchy doesn't mean you should. Keep the initial design simple until everyone's expertise with the product grows, all the bugs shake out, and your support organizations can adapt to the product's new abilities.
10. Client management
Win2K has several client and server features that lower the OS's total cost of ownership (TCO). IntelliMirror and Group Policy help simplify client software installation, from simple applications to the OS itself, and Dfs lets you construct a logical hierarchy of network resources. Dfs lets users across the enterprise access the same resource name (e.g., \\mycompany.com\software), and Win2K redirects the users to the closest share point replica on the network.