Newham Borough
Councilhas tested its core business
applications for compatibility withWindows Vistasix months in advance of
a council-wide rollout across 5,000 desktop PCs.
The council has used AppDNA's AppTitude automated testing tool
to analyse 120 of Newham's core applications.
Geoff Connell, chief information office at Newham, said, "We
found we had lots of versions of the same software and we were able
to target the small minority of applications where there were
incompatibility issues."
AppDNA examined the applications' ability to install and run
under Windows Vista and suggested fixes to address identified
issues to make them Windows Vista ready. Connell said that testing
Newham's core applications for Vista compatibility took less than a
week for one member of the IT team to complete.
AppDNA indicated that nearly 70% of Newham's applications could
be migrated directly to Windows Vista without any compatibility
issues. Other incompatible applications like CD-ROM burning
software was no longer required, as CD-ROM is now built into Vista.
And around 10% of Newham's applications would need remediation work
to run under Vista.
"In many cases, Vista security has shut-down backdoors which
were being used by these applications," he said.
The council had previously planned to upgrade Vista when it
moved over to a new head office in March 2008. However, as Computer
Weekly has previously reported, Newham found that some of its
core applications were not Vista-certified. Newham will now
begin a pilot of Windows Vista, with a view to rolling out the new
operating system in 2009.
"One of the big issues with a Vista rollout is application
compatibility. You're not sure what is compatible and what is not,
which can be daunting when you have thousands of applications. In
successful deployments people take a lot of time in planning and
testing application compatibility," said Dale Vile, analyst at
Freeform
Dynamics.
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