Featured, Opinion - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 15:45 - 9 Comments

The sorry story of Finance’s Windows Vista fail

opinion When I was reading through a large request for tender document issued last week by the Federal Department of Finance and Deregulation, I found a couple of items that made no sense and still don’t.

The document itself dealt with plans to upgrade the department’s network infrastructure to remedy single points of failure in its existing infrastructure — as well as planning for the likely deployment of an IP telephony platform. It was all standard stuff for a large government department in 2010, and I didn’t give it a second thought.

But then when I got to page 21 I found something interesting.

As is often the case in RFT documents, the department had listed its core applications and technology platforms so that bidders for its contract could get an idea of what its internal IT systems looked like. Most of it was standard stuff — Windows Server 2003 and 2008, EMC, Symantec, Citrix Xenapp and so on. Par for the course.

But what really caught my eye was the listing that Finance’s desktop fleet was based on a Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) standard operating environment.

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