UK retailer John Lewis stated that upgrading IT was “tricky business”.
BBC News reported on UK retailer John Lewis’ upgrades from Windows XP to newer software, and the issues that it faced with the upgrade. The operating system (OS) no longer features support from Microsoft as of April, so there are “no more bug fixes or security patches” for 40 percent of businesses still using XP as The Recycler previously reported.
The retailer, which has its own department stores, and the Waitrose chain of supermarkets, had 26,000 desktop and laptop computers to be upgraded to Windows 7 across stores and its head office, with planning for the multi-million pound operation beginning in 2011, before the upgrades began last year.
The retailer stated that “in the early days there was talk of putting it off completely and just paying Microsoft to keep offering bespoke support”, and whilst other big XP users have done so, the option is “not cheap”, with the UK government paying £5.5 million (€6.8 million) for one year’s support – and Microsoft has said that “support prices will increase”.
Paul Miles, Project Manager for John Lewis’s IT department, stated that “no-one thought that would be good value for money”, as it “put off the problem rather than solved it”, and so the first step was finding the 800 applications used on the XP machines and cataloguing them, seeing “which ones will work, and which ones will not work and will never work and need to be upgraded”.
Additionally, Nik Simpson, Research Vice President at Gartner, commented that whilst “updating an operating system is relatively painless”, updating “all the applications that run on top of it is something else entirely”, because changes made by Microsoft in Windows Vista “affect what a programme can do” through User Account Control (UAC), which “limits what your account on a machine can do to that device”, and XP did not have this feature.
Another issue was the older apps “hooked into” features of the OS that when removed caused “problems that an XP upgrade has to deal with”, and modern upgrades are easier because IT “no longer revolves around Microsoft Windows”. John Lewis’ applications had a 90 percent working rate on Windows 7, though that still meant 80 programmes needed upgrading or completely rewriting.
Miles stated that “in the end, some applications we had to keep on XP because there is no alternative. We have had to implement additional security to make sure they stay safe”, and the “scale of the task began to tell”, with “hardware audits” and software developments adding together to make it an “enormous exercise”.
However, after replacing 60 percent of the computers, training staff on new machines and “making all the printers work”, the retailer hit its deadline of upgrading before the April cut-off, with Miles stating that “it’s been difficult but we have got some good things out of it. There are all sorts of knock-on effects to this that are not apparent when we kicked this off”.
You can read about how XP’s demise has affected and will continue to affect the remanufacturing industry in issue 262 of The Recycler, which mails at the end of this month.