Newham U-turns on Vista

NEWHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL has revived the rollout of Microsoft's Vista operating system that it suspended last year after learning that council business would grind to a halt if it used the software.

The East London council said today that it was trialling a "limited rollout" of Vista to see if the council could cope with it after all. Geoff Connell, acting IT director of Newham, said in a statement: "We are working toward a full rollout of the new operating system next year." He said Vista would give the council productivity benefits over its existing operating system, Windows 2000. But he did not specify what those benefits where, nor how much the rollout would cost.

Newham locked itself into a 10-year deal with Microsoft in 2004, which was estimated to cost just below £20m... for about 4,000 personal computers, with Microsoft software and maintenance. Newham had agreed to do marketing for Microsoft as part of the 10-year deal. The deal failed last year when Newham said it had suspended the Vista rollout because too few of the software applications the council uses to conduct its business would work with the new operating system.

The press release explained how Newham had renewed confidence in Vista after using a firm called AppDNA to automatically test whether 120 of its "core" council applications would work with Vista. AppDNA found that "nearly 70 per cent" of the 120 applications Newham chose to test would be compatible with Vista. Less than 13 per cent of them could be "fixed" to work with Vista, said the statement. It did not say what fate awaited the other 17 or so per cent of tested applications.

Cornell said in the press release: "The testing reports also provide the technical information required to fix those applications that will not work." He failed to mention how many applications had not been tested, nor what would happen to those that could not be made compatible. He was unavailable for comment.

He also forget to mention that the Microsoft deal had failed to meet Newham's key objective of improving the council's overall performance rating. Terry Smith, general manager of Microsoft's public sector business, said Newham had demonstrated how "public sector organisations should feel confident about moving to Windows Vista". µ