Case study: Upgrading from XP to Windows 7

The IT head of accountancy firm Baker Tilley talks about his experience migrating over 2,300 PCs across 30 sites to Microsoft's new OS

Vista overlooked in favour of Windows 7 at Baker Tilley

Accounting firm Baker Tilley upgraded 2,318 PCs at 30 sites from Windows XP to the release candidate of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, earlier this year. The company’s IT director, Simon Harding-Rolls, tells Computing why he did it, and anticipates the challenges for other companies in making the move when Windows 7 is fully released in October.
What made Baker Tilley upgrade to Windows 7?

Performance was the most important consideration, but there were other potential benefits right out of the box. We found we could do far more with group policies and those types of things, for example, whereas running XP for so many years meant we could no longer squeeze any more benefits out of it. We generally like to get as much as we can out of the investments we have already made rather than maintain the system, but with XP we were at a stage when maintenance was pretty much all we were doing.

Did you consider upgrading to Windows Vista instead?

We did think about Vista but we did not find it overly appropriate for what we needed. It did not have the required performance on any given hardware, and was not very easy to manage. We originally thought we would go straight to Longhorn, which eventually became Vista, but changed our mind when Microsoft extended technical support for Windows XP.

Did Baker Tilley need to upgrade any part of its hardware estate to support Windows 7?

No, we have a policy where all our hardware is cycled so that nothing is below a certain specification. We had already settled on a specification for a standard Dell desktop and laptop build that would support the operating system, and upgraded to Office 7 at the same time. We did not roll out Windows 7 just to say "we have rolled out Windows 7”, there were a lot of upgrades all wrapped in.

How did you manage the upgrade?
I would love to say we visited every desk but we installed an image remotely. We have a team of six people who put the project and standard build together, and about 18 people out in the offices who deployed and support it.

Were there any application compatibility or driver problems during the migration?

Yes, there were some issues but no showstoppers and nothing we were not able to get around. We started application and regression testing way back in February 2009, so those issues were all tackled early on. Dell was incredibly good at putting us in touch with the right people at Microsoft to talk about things. We did not have to talk to manufacturers about re-writing drivers - we never got into that sort of deep water.
How did Baker Tilley handle Windows 7 licensing and did you get a discount?

It is our policy to keep licensing up to date, and we get some benefits - 10 per cent - from the Microsoft Software Assurance scheme. Like most IT departments, we are members of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) as well. But it is fair to say the real relationship behind this is the one between Baker Tilley and Dell, which supplied us with 2,500 brand new boxes, with the Microsoft partnership on top of that.

Are there other major infrastructure upgrades planned for the near future?

We are planning to install Windows Server 2008 in November. Because we are such a distributed organisation, we really want to explore the potential benefits of branch caching [a feature in Windows Server 2008 that allows data downloaded by a user at one location to be accessible to other users at other locations, thereby minimising network traffic], and getting the most out of the wide area network is quite important. We also like direct access [for remote workers] and the extra control you get [over Windows 7] by using Windows Server at the back end.