XP to Windows 7 – watch out for Legacy and UAC!

A leading US-based telecommunications provider has engaged with ChangeBASE recently in order to assess the impact of migrating its 350,000 desktops from Windows XP to Windows 7. The organisation is looking to reduce its reliance on costly manual resource and get its applications working on the new operating system of choice as soon as possible, and that’s where AOK comes in.

Mike Russell, Solutions Engineer at ChangeBASE, conducted a POC with the organisation to demonstrate how simplicity, speed and efficiency of AOK functionality. These applications were uploaded to the AOK workbench and tested for compatibility with the following:
• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows 7 64-bit
• Internet Explorer 8

Reports were available within minutes with detailed information on which applications were deemed “green” and ready to proceed to UAT, which were deemed “amber” and would require some form of fixing, and which had been flagged as “red” and contained fundamental incompatibilities at program code level.

As you can see, deploying this application estate on Windows 7 would likely to have resulted in substantial difficulties for the organisation, potentially impacting business-critical functionality.

In this case, Legacy Help Files and UAC File Header Issues pose particular problems, with 36% and 24% of Apps being affected.
Custom Action Security Issues and Legacy Control Panel Applet Security Issues present further problems, with 19% and 13% of Apps being affected.

In addition to these risks, assessing this manually would have been a lengthy and costly process, which is precisely what the organisation sought to avoid.