Met Police to finish long-running Windows XP migration by May

Met Police's Next Generation Desktop programme was started in January 2015

London's Metropolitan Police will finish its Next Generation Desktop Windows XP migration project by May this year - almost three-and-a-half years after it started the shift from the insecure and out-of-support operating system.

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP in 2014, but it's remained widely used in the Metropolitan Police, despite being released in 2001.

The Met has been in the process of upgrading to Windows 10 since January 2015. In April 2015, the Met had more than 30,000 XP-based computers, and in 2017, this number was still around 18,000 - an indication of how slowly the migration programme rolled.

Angus McCallum, chief information officer of the Met, told IT Pro that the force's migration programme is currently in an "advanced" stage and that it's almost completed.

He explained that the rollout "will finish around the April-May time, by which time the force "will be off XP". Although the force may have some devices still running on the OS, they "won't be on the network".

The Met is upgrading around 50,000 devices to the latest version of Windows. Last week, the force "rolled out 1,687 tablets". He said the process is "moving at pace now."

McCallum explained that officers are using a range of technologies to boost mobility - including tablets and laptops. These devices are running up-to-date software.

He explained that "operational" and "flexi" officers get access to tablets, while some senior officials are also given laptops. Meanwhile, office-based staff have desktops - but they all run on Windows 10.

The force is investing in new types of technology, too. Thanks to a partnership with Box that was announced in 2017, officers will soon be able to use cloud collaboration tools.

According to McCallum, the Met was testing the tools on a pilot programme, which proved a success. Deployment of the technology will be completed in the second quarter of this year.

He added: "What we really wanted was a collaboration tool so we can share securely information with third-parties that can be structured appropriately. We can make sure it's in the right folders, we can make sure it's not being stored in email, et cetera."

"Rather than them saying 'I've seen something on the CCTV, do you want to come and collect a CD', they send us a link. That saves a lot of time, it's just sent electronically to our control room.

"The officer picks it up straight away, he can look at it, he can determine if there's a crime there or not."