Pharmaceutical companyAstraZenecahas identified more than
20 applications that will fail to install onWindows Vista, as it prepares for a
global roll-out of the Microsoft operating system to 70,000
desktops.
The company is using an automated testing tool called Aok from
Changebase to identify which of its 3,500 desktop applications will
fail to install. The move comes before the firm begins a global
migration from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista, due to commence May
2008.
Concerns over compatibility of applications is one of the
reasons IT directors have delayed deploying Windows Vista. Last
month
Newham Borough Council had to delay a planned March 2008 Vista
roll-out because third-party desktop applications used by the
council had not been Vista-certified.
Robin West, IT project manager at AstraZeneca, said, "One of our
biggest challenges is identifying where migration to Vista will
cause problems with our applications."
Testing 3,500 applications would take a considerable amount of
time. Instead, AstraZeneca has started running Aok, a tool designed
to identify errors that could prevent an application from
installing on Vista.
The tool determines where installation programs will fail to
run, configurations in older versions of Windows that could prevent
applications from installing on Vista, and legacy software
components that could cause compatibility issues.
AstraZeneca found that most of the failures occurred because
installation scripts, known as MSIs, that are used to install the
desktop applications explicitly specified the version of Windows
they would run on. To overcome this, AstraZeneca simply modified
the affected MSI scripts to add Vista compatibility.