Labour says police use of XP poor planning

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networkn

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#1040870 9-May-2014 15:05

andrew027: I'm not sure why the Police have been picked on here - I would imagine there are quite a few government departments still on XP. The quite large one I work for is (our standard desktop environment is XP and Office 2003!) but we are scheduledto be upgraded to Windows 7 and Office 2010 throughout June and July.

It's not just a matter of rolling out a standardised desktop image - there are a number of old business critical applications that need to be tested (and sometimes updated or replaced) first.

And, of course, while paying good money to update software (and often hardware, depending how old your desktop is) might be a gimme for a lot of Geekzone regulars, if the government had forked out the money to update every desktop in the public service six years ago when XP wasn't past it's use-by date, you can bet the opposition and 80% of the public would be complaining about the cost to the taxpayer.

Yup I agree. It doesn't matter what you do, someone will find an angle by which to attack you. I am not fan of politicians, but being in power or being a sports coach must suck.

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#1040983 9-May-2014 18:04

jonathan18:
Jase2985: the defense force is in the same boat, still on XP for most of their computers

I don't think that's correct - I believe many if not most of our computers have already been shifted across to running Windows 7 with a Citrix client.

Devonport is still on XP to the best of my knowledge and pretty much all of the deploy-able environments ie ships are still on XP, HQ in wellington might be on Win 7.

the citrix envirement is all win7/server 2008 but im pretty sure most of the desktops still run win xp

Jase2985: We use a scripted install at work off an image on a USB drive. im not sure if they deploy if over the network though

jonathan18: Nope, we had local IT support physically installing Windows 7 on each PC; I assume this was partly because many people have specific software on their computer which needed to be reinstalled on the local machine (given Office etc is only available via Citrix).

the XP installs were all scripted, or a norton ghost image.

As far as i know they are still working on the latest build of the network

sdav

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#1041005 9-May-2014 18:38

andrew027: I'm not sure why the Police have been picked on here

I do! Because the word Police plus scandal, whether real or perceived, equals media attention and political points scoring.

webwat

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#1041497 10-May-2014 21:50

charsleysa:
geekiegeek: Upgrading an OS isn't just a case of upgrading the PCs, there are likely a number of line of business applications that will also need to be upgraded and this takes a lot of time and money.

As far as moving to opensource, this would require that all staff learn an OS that is likely to be totally different from what they currently use at work as well as at home. Its hard to get staff buy-in when going from one MS Office version to another let alone an entire platform change. Also NZ has a large base of MS support professionals which I doubt is matched (in numbers) by open source professionals which will result in a. lots of MS pros out of work and b. a shortage of opensource pros to actually implement the change over. Also all of those line of business apps will need to be re-written to work on an open source platform. hmmm I wonder how much all of that would cost.

Exactly. Everyone says "go open-source" because it's free but they fail to realize that the only free part about it is downloading it and using it.

You still need to pay the cost of migration, the cost of training end users, the cost of porting (or even recreating) business software, the cost of acquiring IT staff that can manage the new platform.

All those costs added together far exceed the cost of doing a simple upgrade from XP to 8.1 because even incompatible software can be worked around for cheap since its still mostly the same underlying API.

When they originally built the network opensource might have been quite sensible, but now there is definitely a vendor lockin, and most organisations are in the same boat. Even with opensource systems there is often vendor lockin with the proprietary applications and servers that require a specific OS like Redhat etc.

Time to find a new industry!

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#1041504 10-May-2014 22:08

We are migrating from XP to Win 7 at work with the attendant upgrades to Office 2013 etc for most users. It's been anything but smooth for many, with a lot of lost productivity. Aside from platform specific programmes I can see good reasons why many big organisation are slow to switch from XP. Aside frrm the software costs there are other major indirect costs.

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gzt

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#1041527 10-May-2014 22:37

nathan:
gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

Why on earth didn't the cops dump XP ages ago?

This is a very good question to ask in Parliament. If it is asked there might be a good answer.

Is this just another govt department who doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money or do they have a good reason?

The reality is that Microsoft has been trying to end support for XP for many years and failed many times. The team who (I assume) carefully evaluated and made the decision(s) to stick with XP should probably be congratulated in the circumstances for all the money they have saved over that time. In the endgame phase to put it in perspective the cost of $455,100 over 9400 machines is around $48 per machine.

"A police spokesman said it expected to finish migrating computers to Windows 8.1 later this year."

ROTFL!! Imho this is the seriously questionable part, but also it is the hardest for the average person to understand why in a simple soundbite. In addition to W8 teething problems to deal with, this decision almost certainly has a consequence of some serious single vendor lock-in in other line of business services and applications and headaches for other vendors for many years to come starting now. The sales team in Microsoft that got that one sold would have had a massive party after that sale went through. No doubt there were some over the top 'minority report' futuristic style product demonstrations in there as well. I find it hard to believe a team that made the decision to stick with XP would have fallen for that one. Different dept is my guess.

Re the sales, Have you heard of the NZ All Of Government agreement?

Do you think Vodafone & Apple had a massive party when they sold them 10,000 iOS devices and achieved some serious single vendor lockin, as you put it?

I'm not sure you understand the concept of vendor lockin. Apple do not really have a huge infrastructure to sell to support iOS. It would have been a big sale yes, but does not tie to a lot of other products. Also: "The approach used to develop the applications means Police can move to other devices with relative ease as technology changes."

If Vodafone is the network provider for those devices, Voda would have been fairly happy with that sale. While it provides a foot in the door for other Vodafone services, there is nothing about iOS that is tied to Vodafone. This is not vendor lock in.

PhantomNVD

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#1041546 10-May-2014 23:43

Gosh,

just had a quick revisit to freitasm's State of Browsers for March (right before XP cutoff) http://www.freitasm.com/8669
and see even Geekzoners sitting at 12% using XP to access the site!

What's with that... work access perhaps?

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Yabanize

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#1041554 11-May-2014 00:31

surfisup1000:
gzt:
Labour says police use of XP poor planning

Well I'd like to see more evidence of that.

The XP expiry date is almost like 'y2k' I suppose.

From what I can tell MS only gave 1 year warning for end of support but windows 7 has been out for 5 years so this will have been anticipated.

But, maybe it is cheaper to leapfrog win7 and pay the 460k in support to M so they can go straight to win8. This could mean one less upgrade cycle.

Over 9000 PC's, it's a fair bit of cost to upgrade. For me to upgrade my OS and reinstall apps can take nearly a day. But, I'd think they would be more efficient than myself and be using common images.

The only thing i'm sure about after thinking more is that this is being politicized.

They gave notice that it would end in april 2014 in like 2010 or 2009...

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#1041557 11-May-2014 00:54

Actually why not wait for Windows 9

matisyahu

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#1041577 11-May-2014 05:02

surfisup1000: "Labour information technology spokeswoman Clare Curran said the $455,100 police had to spend buying extended support from Microsoft for the 9400 computers was a waste and she believed the situation might be mirrored in other parts of the public sector."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/60055079/labour-says-police-use-of-xp-poor-planning.html

Why on earth didn't the cops dump XP ages ago?

Is this just another govt department who doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money or do they have a good reason? I think probably the former.

If it is the former, I'd expect someone to be fired for negligence.

The whole public service is a giant mess - you'd think that the whole public service would have standardised technology, standards and protocols etc. that all departments adopt but alas it seems that ever department operate as separate entities and when one tries to bring the departments closer everything turns to crap quickly.

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#1041704 11-May-2014 13:54

joker97: correction - the entire beaurocracy is not very smart.

if they hired a consultant to decide whether to stay on XP, move from XP to win 7, move from XP to win 8, that would cost them $10 million, so 0.5 million is cheap

$10 million to upgrade ~9400 pc's, seriously?

Sounds like consultantitis to me....

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#1041766 11-May-2014 16:47

Ragnor:
joker97: correction - the entire beaurocracy is not very smart.

if they hired a consultant to decide whether to stay on XP, move from XP to win 7, move from XP to win 8, that would cost them $10 million, so 0.5 million is cheap

$10 million to upgrade ~9400 pc's, seriously?

Sounds like consultantitis to me....

Reality check = $1064 per machine. Guessing most XP hardware will not be desirable to upgrade. But really the headline cost is the least of the issues usually.

Anyone know the real price for the migration project.. ; ).

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