After you authenticate to AD, the Active Directory Inventory Options page appears.
On this page you can choose to find all computers in all domains or specific
computers from a particular domain, organizational unit (OU), or container.
To scan for software and hardware inventory, WVHA needs an account that has
local administrator privileges on all computers. You can specify as many accounts
as you need on the Inventory Accounts page. You can specify one administrative
account for all the computers in a specific domain or OU, or you can manually
type each computer name with a different set of local administrative credentials.
The Summary of Actions to be Performed page lists the selections you've configured
in the wizard. Before you click Start to begin the scan, be sure the machines
you want to scan are connected to the network and powered on. When the scan
completes, the Your Report is Ready page is displayed. From this page you can
choose to rerun WVHA, open the reports folder (more on reports later), or view
a detailed summary of the wizard's operation. The summary of wizard operations
is great for troubleshooting purposes; each step of the WVHA process generates
a completion code that indicates whether the process succeeded or failed.
The WVHA Reports
WVHA generates a full report and a summary and stores them in the My Documents\WVHA\
Reports\database name folder of the user who ran WVHA. For example, if
I do an inventory and store it in database named VHA, the reports are stored
in My Documents\WVHA\ Reports\VHA. The report names also inherit the name of
the database—for example, VHA Report 20070704 110402.xlsx and VHA Summary
20070704 110410.docx.
The full report in the Excel workbook contains many worksheets and was designed
for systems administrators. The information you'll see in this report includes
WMI status (running or not), IP information, service pack levels, hardware and
software inventory, the current version of Office and whether it can be upgraded
to Office 2007, and whether the computer is upgradeable to Vista. If it isn't,
you'll see a list of tasks to perform in order to make it upgradeable.
The summary report is a Word document designed for management. The management
report comes complete with beautiful pie charts and tables identifying the number
of computers that are capable of upgrading to Vista, as well as the number that
are not upgradeable and why. Although the reports contain a plethora of information,
you won't find information on whether your computers are capable of running
BitLocker Drive Encryption or Aero Glass.
WVUA
To open the WVUA, click Start, All Programs, Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor.
Click Start Scan, and you're off. The WVUA takes a few minutes to run, so be
patient. Once the scan is complete you'll see a high-level report.
In Figure 3, the Upgrade Advisor suggested
installing Vista Home Premium on the XP machine I ran it on. Notice at the bottom
of the report there is a yellow yield sign under System Requirements. Click
the See Details button to get more information, and you'll see a report like
the one in Figure 4.
Notice that there are four tabs on this report: System, Devices, Programs,
and Task List. In the System tab I found that I needed to free up more hard
drive space—in order to upgrade I needed at least 15GB free. The Devices
tab listed several devices that WVUA couldn't find information for (such as
my VMware NIC—go figure) as well as devices for which WVUA found no problems.
I really like the feature that scanned all installed printer drivers for Vista
compatibility even though only one printer was connected when I ran WVUA. The
Programs tab listed several applications that might have problems after I upgrade
to Vista, such as Windows Messenger, some older versions of Adobe software,
and WinZip. If you have an application that should be upgraded to the most current
version, now is the time to do it.
The Task List tab combines information from all the other tabs to provide a
to-do list for before and after the upgrade to Vista. You can choose to print
the task list or save the report from the top right corner of the page.
ACT 5.0
The ACT helps you determine which applications will run properly in an upgrade
and which might encounter problems. Microsoft has created an ACT community where
companies report known upgrade-related problems and fixes (called "mitigations")
for applications. To learn more about this community, see http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/3f5669fd-6b8f-4b27-a49c1e865d8f064e1033.mspx.
To install ACT from within BDD, select Application Compatibility Toolkit from
the list of downloaded components and click the Browse button in the Detail
pane. Then double-click Application Compatibility Toolkit.msi. When the setup
wizard is launched, choose the folder in which you want to install ACT, and
you're finished.
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