Overview of Conducting a Pilot

After you verify your Windows 2000 design in your test environment, you need to test it in your production environment with a limited number of users. A pilot reduces your risk of encountering problems during your full-scale deployment.

The primary purposes of a pilot are to demonstrate that your design works in the production environment as you expected and that it meets your organization's business requirements. A secondary purpose is that the pilot gives the installation team a chance to practice and refine the deployment process.

The pilot provides an opportunity for users to give you feedback about how features work. Use this feedback to resolve any issues or to create a contingency plan. The feedback can also help you determine the level of support you are likely to need after full deployment. Ultimately, the pilot leads to a decision to proceed with a full deployment or to slow down so you can resolve problems that could jeopardize your deployment.

To minimize your risk during deployment, you might want to have several pilots or pilot phases. For example, you might have one pilot for your namespace design, another one for your standard desktop configurations and security model, and still another one for deploying applications remotely.

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