14 DAY TRIAL // John Lewis is one of the companies that had to move its computers from Windows XP to a newer operating system after Microsoft ended support for this version in April.
But as is the case with all the other organizations working with thousands of computers, it’s all a very painful process, mostly because the IT department has to plan pretty much every single step before everything else, just to make sure that no errors are encountered.
Paul Miles, a project manager in John Lewis Partnership's IT department, told BBC in an interview that the company had to plan the migration of 26,000 machines, all of which were supposed to be upgraded to Windows 7. Most of them were used in the headquarters, supermarkets, and department stores.
“The scope of our project was 26,000 devices, both desktops and laptops, that needed to be upgraded to Windows 7,” he said.
Miles explained that buying custom support from Microsoft was also an option, but given the prices, the company decided to upgrade the systems instead of paying for extended patches.
“No-one thought that would be good value for money,” Miles added.
App compatibility was one of the most important issues, the John Lewis worker said, especially because some software no longer works on newer Window versions. Compatibility solutions are however available, but for companies, it’s essential to make sure that all features are fully supported by the new operating system.
“We had 800 separate applications we were running on XP," Miles noted. "There was a lot of activity at the beginning to see which ones will work, and which ones will not work and will never work and need to be upgraded.”
And still, not all applications were running okay on Windows 7, so the company had to invest more money into rebuilding these programs to make them work on the new operating system.
“A lot of those, we had to completely re-write because they were our most important systems,” Miles revealed, adding that 90 percent of their software worked fine. "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.”
The transition from Windows XP is clearly a very difficult process, especially in organizations with more than a thousand computers. That could also be a reason for the huge market share of Windows XP right now, as statistics claim that 25 percent of the world’s computers are still powered by this unsupported operating system version.