Tube Lines on track for Vista migration

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Tube Lines, the London Underground maintenance and upgrade company, is using technology and consultancy services to prepare for the migration next year of its 2,500 users to the Windows Vista operating system (OS).

The company, which provides maintenance services for trains and infrastructure on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, is using appTitude application compatibility testing and appTracker lifecycle management tools from UK application migration specialists, Camwood to carry out its planning for the Vista OS migration to be completed by the third quarter of 2008.

Adrian Davey, head of IT at Tube Lines, told IT PRO the decision to migrate to Vista was taken after completing an application lifecycle assessment exercise last year.

"We had a list of things that had to be in place before we would do the refresh and one of them was an absolute understanding of our application estate, of how our 211 applications would work with different operating systems," he said. "The solution from Camwood has given us the assurance that we are on the right path."

He said the move to Vista would fit with the company's roadmap to update its current Microsoft OS deployment of Windows XP with service pack 1 (SP1). "We discovered more of our application estate would work with Vista than it would do if we moved to SP2," he said.

"And it is more economical and efficient to move straight to Vista than migrate applications twice," he added.

Davey also said Vista would help the company reduce its carbon footprint as part of its 'Go Green' corporate initiative. "A very tangible example of how Vista will help is that it will enable us to 'power down' PCs when not in use; because it saves open files to the cache, users won't find they've lost work after returning to their desk," he said.

He added: "Vista fits with our strategy to bring in innovative and more collaborative working practices, so that we can take advantage of integration to Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 to make sure anyone across our various sites is working on the same version of a document, for example."

Tube Lines is also planning to deploy Microsoft's virtualisation platform, SoftGrid, for a componentised computer-aided design (CAD) application, which Davey said would be to costly and complex to migrate component by component.

Of the Camwood tools, appTitude is a client-server software system that uses automated testing algorithms to carry out the application testing requirement for company's migration to Vista.

AppTracker will build on the exiting application lifecycle management work Tube Lines has already carried out, as well as make sure knowledge of the application estate is formally embedded within the business.

"It's more about ongoing business as usual as it enables our service desk analysts to support the end users more effectively through greater knowledge of our application estate," said Davey.

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