Staging and Deploying Your Design to the Production Environment

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

The importance of staging your deployments of Group Policy can not be overemphasized. After you have performed incremental policy changes in the test environment and verified your changes, you can begin to migrate the Group Policy objects you created to your production domain by using the migrate functionality and the migration tables included in GPMC.

As you begin to implement desktop management services in your organization, look for the desktop management technology that provides the greatest benefit to your organization. Implement that service before you begin to implement others. This gives you the opportunity to test one set of technologies relative to the technologies already in place before you implement another set.

For example, you might decide that protecting and backing up user data would provide the greatest benefit to your organization. You might then choose to implement Folder Redirection in your company so that all user data is centrally stored on a server, facilitating backup. After you deploy Folder Redirection to your users, you can reevaluate whether additional IntelliMirror technologies such as Roaming User Profiles or Software Installation and Maintenance is appropriate to implement next.

By following the processes described in "Staging Group Policy Deployments" in this book, you can ensure that you provide a predictable, consistent configuration management solution.