Federal Parliament deploys Windows Vista

Renai LeMay
Thursday, 02 December 2010 08:00

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

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.