When Microsoft Corp. introduced Windows 2000 last February, you may have been among the many IT managers who were wary of moving forward too quickly. But now that Service Pack 1 has shipped and early adopters have come forth with several months' worth of war stories, you're probably not pondering whether to pull the Windows 2000 migration lever, but when and how.

Well, your first instinct was right -- don't move too quickly. The key to success, say IT managers who have started down that road, lies in copious planning.

"It's a much bigger undertaking" than you might think, says Mike Giresi, director of telecommunications and desktop services at Campbell Soup Co. in Camden, N.J. Campbell is in the early stages of its move to Windows 2000 from 6,500 NT Workstation desktops and 150 NetWare 5.1 file-and-print servers and Windows NT 4.0 application servers. "For everything from the network on through, you need to include all those cost factors or you will underfund the project and it will not be completed properly," Giresi says.

Campbell Vice President and CIO Mike Crowley also advocates the go-slow approach. "We have been planning and doing research and participating in work sessions with our peers, with other vendors, with other major software providers, which is why we haven't moved more aggressively," he says. "We want to make sure we do it as efficiently as possible."

Articulate the Benefits

The key to migration is making sure you not only understand the benefits of migrating to Windows 2000, but are also able to convey those to your audience, whether it be end users or departmental IT peers, says Jerry Higgins, a senior manager at Allstate Insurance Co. in Northbrook, Ill. Allstate plans to begin migrating more than 60,000 NT workstations in March, with 2,500 servers to follow by fall.

But since Allstate has a decentralized IT infrastructure, Higgins relies on individual business units to deploy the server and workstation disk images he issues, so it's important that everyone understand the benefits and the goal.

It's also important to decide which servers should be upgraded and in what order. Dan Kuznetsky, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, says managers are upgrading "largely file-and-print services to begin with, with increasing use [of Windows 2000] as an application platform."

New applications that require Active Directory, such as Exchange Server 2000, may put application servers at the top of the list -- and offer the ammunition you need to justify a general migration to Windows 2000.

Migrate Selectively

Migrate no application before its time, warns Giresi. "We have close to 100 [applications], many of which are not compatible with Windows 2000 yet," he says.

"We've tested these, and they all seem to work. [But] if something does fail, we can't go back to the vendor and troubleshoot it," adds Crowley.

Even if you have some noncompliant applications, you can still move forward with a mixed Windows NT/2000 environment, says Tony Bernard, director of technical architecture at business-to-business exchange service vendor Freemarkets Inc. in

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