Police go for NT ahead of Nspis

The National Strategy for Police Information Systems (Nspis) is being spurned by police forces frustrated by the wait for official endorsement of applications and operating systems, writes Robert Juman Blincoe.

Surrey Police is the latest force to deploy Windows NT as its operating system. The Police IT Organisation (Pito), which sets national strategy, has not yet endorsed NT.

Phil Scutchings, Surrey Police's director of information systems, said: 'We have made a commitment to the environment. We think it's the right one.'

Selecting NT as the backbone of an IT strategy before its inclusion as part of national policy has been described as a 'risk' by Mike Curtis, head of Pito's local police system's directorate.

A Pito management meeting this week was expected to discuss ratifying NT as part of Nspis - 'if all other business was concluded'.

Surrey spent #1.5m installing NT running on 40 Compaq ProLiant servers and 1,000 Compaq Pentium 200 PCs. It is installing an NT-based command and control system, which will go live in November. Surrey police force will start using a Microsoft Exchange-based intranet in February 1998.

Police forces are also waiting for Pito to select a millennium-compliant command and control application, as revealed by Computing last week. This should happen next April, with a pilot running in 1999.

NT gives small forces a cost advantage over Unix. Welsh police force Dyfed Powys adopted NT running on 20 of Digital's Alpha servers. It also has Bull's Storm command and control system running on a dual Alpha cluster.