Northumbrian Water to complete Windows 10 migration in August

CIO James Robbins offers some tips for corporate migrations to encourage user adoption

Northumbrian Water, the north-east based water company that also includes Essex Water, will complete an enterprise-wide rollout of Windows 10 in August, following the rollout of the new operating system to staff working in its contact centres.

Speaking at the company's own internal user conference in Gosforth, Newcastle today, CIO James Robbins said: "We're halfway through the Windows 10 rollout. That's Windows 10 everywhere for the whole organisation, even if you're on an old laptop that's been on XP when we went to Windows 7 and 8. That's a huge programme. The contact centre's done. I think that's probably the toughest area to go through a technology change."

Robbins told Computing that the company made the decision to migrate to Windows 10 last summer after trialling the operating system and conducting some compatibility tests.

"I think it's a Microsoft platform that is more backwards compatible than they have ever been before, so it's much easier for us to package our applications. We've got over 1,000 apps and the migration path for them have been easier than any Windows rollout we've ever done as an organisation," he told Computing.

He added: "It's a great product. It's got loads of additional functionality. It will enable us to build on our cloud strategy. It brings everything together."

This functionality includes the integration with video and with the company's Exchange servers, which are being shifted into the cloud, along with the company's migration to Office 365 and adoption of Delve, which provides integrated, intelligent search based on "the intelligence of who you work with and content you work on", according to Microsoft.

"We've aligned it to a technology rollout with some HPE platforms and that's enabling us to get greater performance and functionality from Windows 10, plus there's also the benefit of much reduced boot-up times," he added.

"We rolled it out first in the contact centre and everybody is raving about the functionality."

The company has also implemented a single sign-on solution at the same time to improve security, but Robbins believes the provision of app-store-like capabilities in Windows 10 will also prove useful.

"You can empower the user to be able to pull apps. Normally, you'd block an EXE [executable] file, for instance, but you can put in your store a load of stuff that you can authorise for them to download, which you know are safe. Everyone's always ringing up support and moaning, 'Can I have this? Can I have that?' and it gives you that Apple-type environment on your desktop," he told Computing.

"A lot of organisations want to decrease the number of apps they use, we're going the other way. We're saying that if you get better functionality and better ways of doing things by having an app, have it. As long as we've tested it and it's safe and packaged.

The deployment was started after several months of preparation. "We trialled it ourselves within the IS team. We had a partner come in and help us to package applications, as we'd done a Windows 10 packaging exercise already. We looked primarily at our top-20 corporate apps, because if we can't run them on Windows 10 we couldn't do it.

"Then, we we have delivered a personalised service: we've had floor walkers, we provided hints and tips, and offered people a hands-on [so they could get a feel for it first]. We have put Windows 10 machines into all of the canteens, and we've had 'hooks' to get people in, like a competition where you could win a Microsoft Surface. The planning and preparation wasn't just about the technology, it was about the deployment as well.

"We also told people how they could upgrade at home if they had Windows 7 or 8. If they didn't have Windows 7 or 8, we had a corporate deal with Microsoft where for £10 you could buy a Windows 10 licence for home use," said Robbins.

The company is now rolling out Windows 10 to several hundred PCs per day, and expects to complete the migration in August.

"We still have other regions to roll out to. We haven't done Essex Water yet. We have a big, corporate centre in Essex that we've still to do. And there's some more complicated areas where we have more challenging applications to migrate, but we're in ramp-up speed. We're now doing about a couple of hundred machines a day, so we'll be finished by August," Robbins told Computing.

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