Windows XP upgrade proves tricky business for John Lewis

I don&#x27;t feel bad for all those businesses that bought applications built with ActiveX software and had to stick on Windows XP and IE6 forever.<p>A lot of that software had horrible UIs, causing severe stress for employees. Imagine hand entering detailed orders where just the tiny wrong thing was off, the wrong order, a typo in a SKU number, the wrong quantity would costs thousands lost in shipping and product returns. The employee gets the blame when that happens. No undo, no saving progress, no validation, no checking of any kind, just HTML input boxes powered by ActiveX and the employee gets the blame for things that could have been automated better.<p>You ever had your taxes done at H&amp;R Block? They still use some ancient software where you can&#x27;t even copy and paste out of an input box. In 2014. On a desktop.<p>I&#x27;m talking about PeopleSoft software and ugly, clunky and buggy software by some local developer written in their garage at rock bottom prices for a company that could have afforded more but just didn&#x27;t care about what it was putting its employees through. I&#x27;m glad they&#x27;re having to pay through their teeth now. It&#x27;s companies like this that kept IE6 around so long.

I&#x27;ve been on the arse end of an XP migration over the last couple of years. It was an unmitigated disaster although the PR for the event says otherwise.<p>Typically a lot of the ActiveX vendors that were relied on to prop up the browser functionality that had previously been migrated from IE5&#x2F;Win2000 are gone. There is no source code so the only result is to hire in contractors to rewrite&#x2F;replace functionality from scratch as a winforms app (as browsers still can&#x27;t do this sort of stuff, Silverlight is canned and the contractors don&#x27;t know WPF). This is not a bad thing but it has a cost.<p>Add to that, the server side, a completely insecure hodge-podge of ASP that only worked on Windows 2003 and VB6 COM components. This needed scrapping and starting again. Typically they did this with contractors who just about knew ASP.Net web forms, some WCF and a bit of SQL so we&#x27;re talking circa 2005-2008 tech for the rewrite.<p>Then there&#x27;s the hardware which had 10baseT networks so the entire core switches were replaced, all the cabling was replaced and the workstations were all replaced, 25 servers were replaced, the network appliances were replaced and a SAN was added.<p>Ten years down the line, a rewrite will be due and it will require porting to Windows X (10) and all the tech will have changed again.<p>So £15.5m every decade for this platform + maintenance on top.<p>That&#x27;s a lot of bottom line out of the window for a tech choice. At least with other platforms, incremental change is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper (Java EE &#x2F; generic Unix).

&gt; No more support means no more bug fixes or security patches - a situation that makes it much more vulnerable to attack by cyber thieves.<p>I always feel funny when I read lines like these. It&#x27;s not like Windows XP suddenly went from best-in-class, sound and secure system component into something miserable. It kind of always was.

&gt; How did your Windows XP upgrade go?<p>About three weeks of frustration, but now I&#x27;d never want to go back. As a developer, Linux is so much more flexible.

I was surprised to see an XP box running on the desk in a doctor&#x27;s consulting room in Wales the other day. I thought it had gone away, but obviously not...

I wonder what would be more cost effective, freaking out and updating en masse every 10 year, or keeping up and upgrading&#x2F;rewriting old programs as time go...<p>I&#x27;m thinking the second, but I might be wrong..

TL DR; John Lewis Partnership upgrades 26,000 desktops from Win XP to 7. They had hundreds of applications, most worked, some didn&#x27;t (80). Article says these were some of the most critical systesm. Article talks about Windows UAC as an impediment.