Completing the Pilot Deployment Program

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

After you finish the pilot deployment program, retain the pilot deployment environment and use it as a staging environment for your production deployment. Continue to use the pilot forest to verify new deployment processes, such as adding new applications or schema extensions, installing operating systems, creating Group Policy objects, or restructuring organizational units.

As noted earlier, provide a fallback plan by leaving user accounts enabled in both the original production environment and the pilot deployment environment. Keep users in the pilot deployment environment to do their production work; do not migrate the accounts from the pilot deployment environment to the production forest. Instead, if you decide to move pilot users to another production forest, migrate them from their original production environment. This ensures that all users in the production forest have consistent accounts and makes troubleshooting easier.