blog iTNews has published an excellent article today detailing how almost all of Westpac’s staff are still running Internet Explorer 6, and, presumably, Windows XP). The publication reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“Westpac staff have been left running outdated operating systems and browsers after the bank indefinitely postponed a $20 million technology refresh project aimed at delivering a consistent desktop experience across the group.”

We’d ask what gives, given that XP first came out in 2001, and even Microsoft itself has set a global countdown watch on the long-lived version 6 of its browser. But the sad truth is that many major financial services organisations and government departments in Australia are still running both. NAB only upgraded to Windows XP from NT (yes, I said NT) in 2008, while CommBank still runs Windows XP (on its MacBook Air fleet, no less) and the Department of Defence only recently upgraded to IE7. Disclosure: Delimiter runs predominantly on Chrome, with the odd Firefox flirtation.

news Delays appears to have struck the National Australia Bank’s core banking modernisation project, with the bank yesterday revealing it had pushed back the implementation of the foundation of its new Oracle-based platform to 2012, having focused on other aspects of the project this year.

NAB’s core overhaul — dubbed NextGen for ‘Next Generation Platform’ — has been in the works since at least August 2008, when the bank announced it had picked Oracle’s i-Flex platform as the centrepiece of its banking operations moving forward. However, unlike CommBank which has conducted the equivalent of an open heart transplant to replace its core with SAP technology over the past several years, NAB chose to dip its toe in the water first, rolling out the technology in its UBank online brand first to get some early lessons.

In May this year, the bank stated that it had defined the targeted operating state for NextGen, was building the platform, and had already activated some of the new platform’s functionality — such as customer analytics tools. In 2011, the bank noted, it would deploy what it described as the “foundation release” of NextGen, as well as making a new general ledger system operational and deploying extra capability through the program into its securitisation platform.

However, in its annual results briefing yesterday, the bank revealed a key component of its rollout had slipped its planned implementation date. The bank’s new general ledger system is now operational, and it has deployed extra capability into its securitisation program. But the deployment of NAB’s foundation release of NextGen has been pushed back to be a priority in the 2012 financial year — which is already almost halfway over.

In addition, it appears that a number of other NAB IT projects have also slipped. In May the bank noted it was planning to upgrade its contact centre voice telecommunications infrastructure. A pilot of that rollout has been conducted, but the completion of the project has been pushed back in 2012. The bank also continues to wrestle with a project to replace its payments systems.

However, it hasn’t all been delays for the bank’s IT operation over the past six months. In that period, NAB did complete a substantial network modernisation project, and it has also commenced a refresh of its PC and laptop fleet. It successfully deployed additional capability into its securitisation platform, as it had said it would, and a number of new aspects to the core banking modernisation project are being planned — such as the implementation of a new credit risk engine and “funds transfer pricing capability”, as well as an overhaul of the bank’s CRM systems which will deliver it a single customer view.

Extending UBank’s capabilities is also listed as a priority in 2012, and the bank also noted that it had boosted the availability of its customer-facing systems.

Throughout all of this, NAB continued to throw resources — both human and financial — at its technology operation. Although hundreds of full-time technology jobs have been eliminated at the bank as a result of its IT outsourcing deal with IBM inked in December last year (reportedly, some 425 roles were affected), the bank’s Business Services division actually increased by 82 net roles — although its wholesale banking area lost 277 staff, for reasons including “lower technology project activity”. The bank had previous added 948 roles to Group Business Services to May.

Investment in infrastructure was also heavy, with the bank spending $719 million on the area in the year to September 11 — up a whopping 56 percent on the previous year. “Most of this investment was made in the group’s Next Generation Banking IT platform and convergence of key technology and operational infrastructure,” the bank wrote in supporting documents.

opinion/analysis
If you believe the scuttlebutt in the industry, these aren’t the first delays to hit NextGen, and I would bet that they won’t be the last. Over the past year, I’ve repeatedly asked NAB to comment on what’s happening behind its closed doors with respect to the initiative, and mostly what I have gotten in return is bland statements devoid of any context, or refusals to comment on the matter.

This is in stark contrast with the approaches taken by all of the other banks. Westpac, CommBank and ANZ have all been extremely open over the past year or so about their IT transformation projects. I suspect the fact that NAB has not been is reflective of the fact that it has a number of gremlins still to fix in the long-running NextGen project … gremlins which it wants to eliminate before talking more about it publicly.

The bank’s desktop refresh project is also fascinating although little is currently known about it.

Those with long memories will recall NAB was one of the last major organisations in Australia to roll out Windows XP, finalising its deploying only in 2007 to some 28,000 machines. The bank has tested Windows 7, but I’m betting it wouldn’t be hugely keen to immediately move to Microsoft’s latest desktop opus quickly, after the tortured effort that was its previous Windows NT to XP upgrade.

It would be interesting to know whether the desktop refresh mentioned yesterday was only a hardware refresh — and whether, like CommBank, NAB just ported its XP SOE onto the new machines.

Then there’s NAB’s CRM strategy, also mentioned in brief yesterday. Some may recall that the bank was highly focused on CRM back in late 2005, under then-CEO Ahmed Fahour, who was no doubt eyeing off CommBank’s successful CommSee migration and seeking to bring some of its lessons to NAB. I’m not quite sure how far NAB’s CRM overhaul got (at the time, it was using a legacy Teradata package), but I’m betting that the mention of CRM this week means NAB has a long way to go before it gets the much-mooted “single customer view”.

All in all … it looks like NAB has got its work cut out for it on many fronts when it comes to technology at the moment. No wonder it’s spending a bomb. A 55 percent increase in infrastructure spend over just one year is incredible — the bank must be throwing money at all of these areas internally.

The other thing which NAB’s disclosures this week reminds me of is CommBank CIO Michael Harte’s audacious statement that his bank was years ahead of its rivals when it comes to technology. I’m not sure Harte could make that claim when it comes to Westpac, as I’m sure Bob McKinnon and Sarv Girn have matters well in hand. Nor would I believe it of Suncorp.

However, when it comes to NAB, it seems likely Harte’s fighting words may have indeed been correct. CommBank has already completed projects over the past few years in many of the areas which NAB discussed this week. Well … being philosophical about it, at least NAB is trying to catch up. I’m not sure the same thing can be said of poor old ANZ ;)

Image credit: Delimiter

news The nation’s largest telco Telstra has confirmed it is currently in the midst of one of Australia’s largest known rollouts of Microsoft’s latest Windows 7 desktop platform, in an initiative which will eventually most of the company’s 40,000 staff.

When Windows 7 was first released in late 2009, the telco had confirmed plans to migrate off its predominantly Windows XP-based desktop standard operating environment and onto Microsoft’s latest desktop opus, but like many Australian organisations, the pedal didn’t hit the metal immediately.

In April 2009 the company’s then-chief the telco’s chief architect of Technology Architecture Strategy and Planning Clive Webber told ZDNet.com.au the company had had a number of informal testers of Windows 7 within its ranks and had planned a more formal test when Windows 7 was eventually released. At that stage Webber had noted that Windows XP had reached end of life status, with Windows 7 to provide improved stability, security and user experience functionality, as well as lower support costs.

Sources within the company said the telco was currently doing a “staggered” rollout of the software. “My XP workstation is due for the upgrade in a few weeks,” one staffer said. A Telstra spokesperson confirmed the rollout was ongoing and progressively affecting all staff.

It’s not clear just how many workstations Telstra currently runs — with many of its staff being shop floor assistants or engineers constantly on the road to customers’ premises. However, the company’s last annual report published in the middle of this year stated the company had close to 40,000 staff. Like most Australian organisations the company skipped Microsoft’s poorly regard Windows Vista release.

The move to Windows 7 also perhaps puts paid to one of the nation’s longest-running corporate flirtations with open source software on the desktop.

Back in 2003, Telstra flagged a widespread trial of Linux on its desktop PCs, along with Sun’s Star Office productivity suite (which became OpenOffice.org) and other software such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. However, Telstra’s open source plans — under then-chief information officer Jeff Smith, now leading IT for banking and insurance group Suncorp — was later analysed as a gambit designed to bring its Microsoft-related expenses down.

In 2004 Telstra signed an extensive deal with Microsoft for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and other Microsoft software for its then-40,000 desktops — with the total value of the deal expected to be worth more than $20 million. At the time, it was believed that Microsoft was lowering prices across several countries in specific cases to avoid a high-profile organisation switching to Linux and an open source productivity suite.

The news comes as research emerged last week in a Forrester report sponsored by systems integrator Dimension Data that Australian organisations were increasingly looking to deploy Windows 7 — despite the fact that Windows 8 is close to reaching production. One of the other major Windows 7 rollouts is expected to be the desktop consolidation project at the Federal Department of Human Services, the new super-department formed through the merger of Centrelink, Medicare and other agencies.

Image credit: Microsoft

news It might have taken a few years for Australia to shift into gear when it comes to Windows 7, but evidence is growing that the nation’s initial flirtation with the platform is rapidly accelerating into a full-blown romance.

A substantial new piece of evidence for the idea that Australian organisations are increasingly adopting the software has arrived over the past few weeks, with new research published by systems integrator Dimension Data being published in the area. The research took the form of a survey which DiData commissioned analyst firm Forrester to carry out on some 546 organisations located both in Australia and overseas. The findings from the report primarily focused on the increasing global trend towards desktop virtualisation, but also generated a number of data points around local adoption of Windows 7.

According to Forrester, some 12 percent of the Australian organisations surveyed in the report said they had already completed their enterprise-wide migrations to Windows 7. A further 46 percent said they had begun “aggressive” efforts to migrate to Windows 7, with another 26 percent planning to kick off deployment within the next year.

Of the total sample, about 46.6 percent of Australian organisations still maintained installations of Microsoft’s most popular legacy operating system, Windows XP, while about 10.7 percent supported Vista. It appears that about 29.9 percent of organisations had some Windows 7 installations being supported in-house.

The data reflects a growing body of anecdotal evidence that appears to show organisations around Australia rapidly adopting Windows 7.

One of the largest migrations nationally is expected to be the Federal Department of Human Services, the new super-department created by the merger of Centrelink, Medicare and a number of other government bodies such as the Child Support Agency. Centrelink was already planning to implement Windows 7, and the platform looks like it will become standard across the entire department – eventually affecting some 55,000 users.

The desktop platform is also being deployed in other Federal Government agencies such as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, which is currently enmeshed in a widespread rollout and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

In the education sector, Windows 7 deployments are also gradually being revealed, with names such as the University of Canberra, the University of Southern Queensland, La Trobe University, Brisbane Girls Grammar, St Leonard’s College in Melbourne, the Victorian Department of Education and more deploying the software.

In the private sector deployments are less well-known, but companies such as Perth-based fabrication, construction and services company AGC are known to have deployed the technology, as well as Toyota Australia and MYOB, and giants such as Woolworths have said they are investigating rollouts themselves.

The rapidity of the rollout of Windows 7 in Australia comes in contrast to that of its predecessor, Window Vista, which was broadly ignored by Australian organisations, with the exception of several Federal Government departments. Hence, most of the known Windows 7 migrations consist of upgrades from Windows XP. Similarly, no organisations are known to have yet expressed an interest in deploying Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 platform, which was recently released to developers in an early preview form.

According to the Dimension Data research, some organisations are prioritising desktop and application virtualisation programs over Windows 7 migrations, while others are linking the two separate initiatives into overarching programs.

“Many of our clients are grappling with complex issues relating to their applications ecosystems,” said DiData chief technology officer Ettienne Reinecke. “And while the research indicates that the major drivers behind desktop virtualisation are cost reduction and security, 47% of participants said that they recognised that applications virtualisation will help them to migrate to Windows 7.”

Some companies have even preferred to switch to Apple’s Mac platform, especially for the robustness of its laptop hardware, while continuing to run Windows XP and investigating virtualisation. This was the approach taken by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for example, in its recent shift to a next-generation working space based in Sydney’s Darling Park complex.

opinion/analysis
Having used Windows XP, Vista and 7 extensively over the years, as well as Apple’s Max OS X and various flavours of Unix, it has been my personal experience that the greatest productivity improvements in my information-rich workflow came about when I implemented Windows 7 on the desktop, complete with multiple large monitors.

The platform is just much, much more stable and fast than either Windows XP or Vista when it comes to running lots of applications simultaneously and using your PC for communicating via email, unified communications, instant messaging and so on.

With this in mind, I would encourage all Australian organisations currently using legacy XP or Vista on its PCs and laptops to upgrade to Windows 7 as soon as possible. With excellent deals in the education sector, and whole of government deals bringing down the price in the public sector, it’s more affordable than ever these days, and your organisation’s staff will thank you profusely. It’s also the right time for it — Windows 7 is a stable platform now, while Windows 8 is too far away and unclear to be a realistic deployment target.

The cost of a couple of large monitors, a modern PC and Windows 7 is quite modest compared to any worker’s annual salary, and you’ll get much more out of your staff. Of course, you’ll need to take a number of other factors into account – migration plans, application compatibility and so on – but much of that can be resolved these days by automated deployment tools and virtualisation software. I’ve yet to find a company which has had many problems with upgrading to Windows 7 internally – Microsoft has made this fairly painless.

As I’ve previously written, I’m not yet sure where desktop virtualisation fits into this picture. Major desktop virtualisation initiatives are clearly increasing in frequency at the moment – for example, a flagship 2,400 user rollout at the Australian Securities and Investment Commission – but it’s not quite clear yet whether (when?) they will become the dominant paradigm. One to watch very closely.

Know of any major Australian Windows 7 deployments? Drop us a line through our anonymous tips line. Even we won’t know who you are.

Image credit: techedlive, Creative Commons

blog We’d laugh about this, but really we’d prefer to cry instead. The CommonWealth Bank of Australia is currently deploying thousands of MacBooks (Airs and Pros) to staff at its flagship new headquarters in Sydney’s Darling Park complex … but with Windows XP configured to boot by default. ZDNet.com.au reports:

“Each staff member in the Commonwealth Bank’s new precinct is issued a fully specced out 11-inch MacBook Air running Windows XP, as well as a Jabra DECT headset.”

And iTNews has more detail:

“A majority of Commonwealth Bank Place staff were issued with 11-inch MacBook Air laptops, configured by integrator HP to boot directly into the bank’s Windows XP standard operating environment.”

The rollout is doubly ironic given that it was only in June this year that CommBank chief information officer Michael Harte was praising the Apple interface. At the time, this is what Harte told the Financial Review about the issue:

“New entrants … coming into the workplace and they expect the convenience that they get at home on their desktop at work,” Harte says in the interview. “If they’ve become au fait with and love the convenience and richness of an Apple interface, and then have to go back to some clumsy PC that’s being run by some enterprise service group, they get frustrated.”

When I was at ZDNet.com.au a few years back, we asked CommBank whether it was interested in deploying Windows 7; however the bank said that although it had reviewed the beta of Windows 7, it had no plans to deploy it at that stage. Looks like Win7 is still on the backburner for the bank.

opinion Right now chief information officers and IT managers right around Australia are facing a difficult decision regarding one of the most critical but also trouble-plagued segments of their IT infrastructure — their desktop fleets.

There are a number of forces coming into play here.

Perhaps the simplest of these is the traditional operating system generational change that we’re all used to by now. With the release of Windows 7 in late 2009, Microsoft has finally delivered a worthy successor to its ageing but still dominant Windows XP platform; and organisations right around Australia are eyeing off this long-awaited upgrade with relish.

However, the case for simply upgrading a bunch of legacy PCs to new hardware running Windows 7 is not as easy a decision as one might have assumed even two years ago. Today the whole paradigm of the desktop PC itself is under siege from a number of angles.

As Australian organisations start to reach the 100 percent server virtualisation mark (and Australia is one of the keenest adopters of this technology in the world), IT workers are looking around for other parts of their IT infrastructure to virtualise, and desktops are a logical next step.

Only this week, NSW electricity utility TransGrid emarked on a 50 user desktop virtualisation project, and it’s not alone. The National Broadband Network Company, the Department of Defence, the Department of Health and Ageing, and the City of Cockburn in Western Australia are all going down this virtualised desktop path.

These organisations are not playing around with thin clients. They are deadly serious about implementing the technology to drive real outcomes in their business. In the age-old centralise/decentralise IT paradigm debate, centralisation is in vogue.

However, there’s also more to the story.

PCs are highly adaptive tools which can be used for many different purposes. But if you’re only after a set of discrete use cases — such as entering data into a CRM platform and checking your email — many organisations are realising that a more specialised unit like an iPad may in fact be a better option.

Australian organisations like Brickworks are already close to ditching the desktop PC or laptop altogether for many staff, with sales staff increasingly equipped with iPads instead. “You can fully expect that as laptops come up for renewal, [the thinking will be] why would you buy a laptop if you could manage it with an iPad?” Brickworks business support manager Baden Bradbury said last month.

But wait, there’s more.

Desktop virtualisation is all well and good, but it’s still a ‘fat’ solution to a problem which can increasingly be solved through a ‘thin’ mechanism instead. With companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and even Oracle making strong plays to provide software as a service through a web browser instead of via a desktop deployment, there is often very little reason why many staff members can’t do most of their work in a web browser.

I don’t expect Google’s pure cloud laptops running Chrome OS to take off in Australia, but what I do expect to see is organisations increasingly providing most of their corporate applications to their staff through a web browser or a virtualised application environment from a vendor like Citrix, and the employees themselves increasingly accessing those applications through their own personal PC, rather than a company-provided one.

Indeed, we’re already seeing this trend take force at innovative, technology-friendly companies like Suncorp, which has actually decided not to refresh its corporate desktop fleet. “People should use the device they feel the most productive in,” Suncorp CIO Jeff Smith told the Australian in late March. And we couldn’t agree more.

So what does this all add up to?

For small Australian organisations, the choice is becoming increasingly clear: Outsource as much as is safe to the cloud, facilitate your employees using the equipment they like best, and you’ll cut capital costs out of the business, as well as making yourself popular with your staff.

For medium and large organisations, however, putting together an internal business case around the future of a company’s desktop fleet is going to be a really tough ask in the short to medium term. This is a technology area which is in a constant state of flux at the moment, and few will be brave enough to predict precisely what will happen next.

After all, let’s not forget that the iPad only launched in Australia just over 12 months ago. It is basically impossible to say right now what the next 12 months will bring.

But one thing is clear. The days where Australian organisations would simply shell out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for a new batch of desktop PCs every three to five years are now over. We are in a new and more complex world now. And that’s not a bad thing.

Image credit: Bruno Cordioli, Creative Commons

The Federal Government’s peak technology strategy group has published a significant new policy that lays out common standards for deploying new desktop PC and laptop enviroments for the entire public sector in Canberra. However, workers frustrated with their lack of control over their work computer may not find much to like in the document.

Traditionally, many government IT departments have maintained direct control over the desktop fleets they administer — restricting users from installing their own applications and customisations without permission. Although many employees dislike the restriction inherent in such policies, IT managers and government administrators have argued successfully that they allow sensitive government information to be held securely and for staff to focus on working during business hours.

It appears the trend will continue under the standard operating environment policy issued by the Australian Government Information Management Office yesterday.

The document states that “by default”, staff are not to have accounts which grant them privileged access to their PC. In addition, the workstations themselves should be configured to ensure unused features were removed or disabled, and the configuration and updating of machines should be done centrally by the desktop support provider — and not by the user themselves.

Alternative web browsers such as Firefox and Chrome are currently gaining in popularity around Australia, with many workers finding their open and extensible nature delivers them advantages over the browser that is the default for most large organisations — Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. However, AGIMO’s policy states users must not be able to install their own “unauthorised add-ins” to their browser, and the browser software itself must be centrally managed.

Any email clients used must be able to work offline — so that users can still work if they are disconnected from the corporate network — and AGIMO has set Microsoft’s Office Open XML format, which is not supported by a number of alternative office suites, as the default document standard. Users are not to be able to halt anti-virus activities on their machines, AGIMO wrote — or firewall software, with the aim of making sure security standards were maintained. And logging and remote access by administration staff must be possible.

AGIMO has been asked to comment on to what degree it believed some of the standards outlined in its policy document had the potential to hinder efficiency within the Federal public service and restrict alternative software from being used.

When queried this morning, a number of current and former government workers laughed off the Federal Government’s current desktop software strategy as a bad joke. One former public sector staffer said at his previous workplace, he had been locked out of installing new applications or drivers, or even changing his background picture or saving files to his desktop. Calling the help desk to get fixes done was also problematic, he said — as even for a 10 minute fix, internal billing would show the change as having taken two hours, increasing government expenses.

Another former government worker said it was her normal practice to take her MacBook Pro into work and use it instead of the Government-supplied desktop — emailing herself reports and documents to be worked on and then sending them back to her work machine.

One worker at the Australian Taxation Office bemoaned the fact that the agency still used Internet Explorer version 6 — first released in 2001 — and most of the staff who spoke to Delimiter about the matter communicated their frustration with the fact that they were still forced to use Windows XP — also first released in 2001.

Not everyone was unhappy with the state of affairs, however. One user said they were able to use Windows 7 (the 64-bit version) at work, with 6GB of memory. But, they noted, they had control over their own desktop environment — which most government workers didn’t.

Image credit: Microsoft

Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows 7 has been out for more than a year, but Australia’s Federal Parliament revealed this week that it will ignore the release in the short term and is instead in the process of upgrading to its much-maligned predecessor, Windows Vista.

In unrelated tender documents, the Department of Parliamentary Services — which provides IT services to the nation’s federal politicians, their staff and employees of the parliament itself — said it was “partway” through upgrading its approximately 3,900 workstations from Windows XP to Vista Service Pack 1.

The department’s desktop fleet consists of Compaq EVO, HP DC7100, Acer Veriton and Dell Optiplex machines, including laptops used by politicians. The parliament didn’t give a reason for its decision to pick Vista instead of Windows 7, but will be contacted during business hours today with a request for comment on the issue.

Windows Vista was broadly ignored by all but a few large Australian organisations, with most choosing to keep running the long-lived Windows XP platform instead of upgrading to an operating system which had suffered a problematic development cycle. A number of features promised for Vista didn’t make it into the end release, and reviewers pinioned Microsoft for stability and driver problems in the platform.

However there have been several notable installations of Vista in the Federal Government.

The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, for example, became one of the first organisations in Australia known to have deployed Vista in its 2007 rollout to some 5,500 machine, upgrading from Windows 2000 at the time. In early 2009 the agency stipulated it had no plans to upgrade to Windows 7.

And the Department of Finance and Deregulation, which houses the Federal Government’s peak IT agency, the Australian Government Information Management Office, deployed Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to its 1,870 desktop PCs and laptops in late 2009, as Windows 7 itself was released.

Other agencies, however, decided to wait for Windows 7. In April 2009 Centrelink confirmed it had been testing the early versions of Windows 7 and had the impression that they showed a significant improvement over the performance and quality of Vista. The agency at the time confirmed long-term plans to shift off Windows XP and onto Windows 7.

Similar moves are taking place in the private sector — for example, Telstra in April 2009 revealed plans to shift its tens of thousands of desktops onto Windows 7.

Vista was initially released in January 2007. Two years later analyst firm Forrester released a report showing that Vista was powering just below 10 percent of all PCs within enterprises in the United States. At the time the analyst firm noted “considerable interest” in Windows 7, slated to be released later that year.

Is your organisation deploying a new desktop platform — Windows Vista, Windows 7 or even *gasp* Mac OS X or Linux? Drop us a line anonymously and let us know — even we won’t know who you are.

Image credit: Office of Malcolm Turnbull

Commonwealth Bank of Australia is the latest Australian organisation to confirm it was hit today by the disastrous bug in McAfee’s security software which has also taken down a number of Coles stores and knocked out 25 percent of Virgin Mobile’s PCs.

An update to McAfee’s security suite released on Wednesday hit PCs with Windows XP Service Pack 3, causing network outages or constant rebooting. The problem has since been rectified, but large organisations around Australia are still dealing with the fallout.

A Commonwealth Bank spokesperson told Delimiter this afternoon there were no ATMs affected by the outage, but a number of staff had not been able to login to their PCs.

The bank’s IT department had been working since “the early hours of this morning” to fix the impacted PCs, with the priority being minimalisation of disruption to customers. The bank expects to have worked through the problems by the end of the day. “In terms of numbers it’s minimal,” the spokesperson said, with the branch network not being affected.

The news comes as the bug took down what a Coles spokesperson referred to as “virtually all” of the retail giant’s stores in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and South Australia, causing about 1,100 of its checkout registers to fail this morning.

“That in turn meant there were a number of stores, mainly in Western Australia, that actually had to be closed this morning, because they didn’t have enough registers that were actually operable to serve customers,” the spokesperson said.

Like other IT departments around the nation, Coles’ IT team has spent the day rebooting the systems. The retail giant was able to catch the bug before it hit the Eastern states. McAfee has been cooperating with Coles today to fix the issue.

And a spokesperson for Virgin Mobile also confirmed it had been hit by the outage, with about 25 percent — or around several hundred — of its PCs in its head office suffering the problem.

The spokesperson noted it was fortunate that none of its machines servicing customers had been affected, although some of the telco’s retail stores suffered outages. Manual processes were used so that customers could still conduct business with Virgin. Most of the problems were fixed by lunchtime and some were even fixed by the start of business at 9AM.

Delimiter is contacting McAfee’s Australian office for a comment on the situation.

Image credit: Arkaitz Zubiaga, Creative Commons

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has told staff it will shortly be upgrading their desktop browser from version 6 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer software to version 7.

The bank has been running on IE6 for a number of years as part of version 3 of its desktop standard operating environment (SOE). However, it emailed staff recently to let them know they could look forward to IE7 as part of SOEv4, which is to be rolled out progressively from March. CBA has about 38,000 staff in total.

IE7 is a more modern browser than IE6, introducing new features such as the tabbed browsing made popular in rival browsers like Firefox, an anti-phishing filter and enhanced support for web standards. Microsoft reworked a number of core areas for IE7′s release — such as the rendering engine and the way the software handles security.

However, IE7 was released in October 2006 and has since been superceded by version 8 of the Microsoft browser, which was released in March 2009. Internet Explorer 9 is currently in development.

The bank may not be that unusual when it comes to what would be likely to be percieved by many consumers and early technology adopters as a slow approach to upgrading its browser technology. For example, a report by research house Forrester found in May 2009 that 60 percent of companies still used IE6 as their main browser at that point, with IE7 pulling in a respectable 39 percent at that point, and Firefox sitting at 18.2 percent.

It’s understood CBA needed to test a plethora of applications for compatibility with IE7 before starting to rollout the upgrade — a common problem in certain sectors, such as in financial services and some areas of government.

There have been relatively few high profile deployments of Firefox within Australian corporates, although it is common to hear anecdotal evidence that users are requesting the open source browser be installed by IT departments.

The bank’s new standard operating environment will be again based on Windows XP, although CommBank is testing Windows 7. In April 2009 the bank had said it had examined Windows 7, but was yet to formally test what was then the beta version of the software. The final version of Windows 7 was released late last year.

One further upgrade to make it into the new SOE will be welcome in some of the bank’s branches. It’s understood a lack of modern broadband connections into some locations had made delivering online video based on Adobe Flash an issue. The bank had previously disabled the software in certain situations — such as if a branch was using an old ISDN connection for internet access.

However, it will now enable Flash across its operations following gradual network upgrades to bring the old connections up to speed. A CommBank spokesperson said the bank had “nothing to announce” when asked to comment for this article.

Image credit: Microsoft