Upgrade to Windows 10? What's the hurry, asks London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
Council happy to stick with Windows 7 'for the next few years'
The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) has no intention of moving to Windows 10 in the near future because it "isn't essential", according to Sheyne Lucock, LBBD's general inspector of IT and group manager of customer services, contracts and business improvement.
When Computing asked Lucock whether the council was looking to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, he said: "No we're not. We bought out of our Microsoft enterprise agreement a few years ago, so that left us with perpetual licences until Windows 7, which is what we're stuck on at the moment.
"Obviously, Microsoft talked about it being a free upgrade, but it's not a free upgrade to corporate users in the absence of any kind of enterprise agreement," he said.
Lucock went on to state that "within the next few years it isn't essential to move to Windows 10".
"However, we would have to make a decision about what we want to do in the next few years because [Microsoft] support will run out for Windows 7 in 2020, so by then we will have to have made a decision on what we will do," he said.
Lucock said that as the council is connected to the Public Sector Network (PSN), there will come a point where the local authority is forced to move to Microsoft's latest operating system.
"Once Microsoft stops supporting products it affects our PSN compliance - that's why we got rid of Windows XP when we did, because otherwise we would have failed PSN requirements," he said.
He also said that he didn't understand how there were so many other organisations that are connected to PSN that still use Windows XP as an operating system.