According to well-placed sources, the authorities have purchased the Windows XP licences under a three-year leasing agreement with roll-out expected to be completed within 18 months.
If the project is exhaustive, the operating system could be deployed on up to 9,000 desktops and an unknown number of laptops used by the Department's 17,000 employees.
When contacted, AlphaWest, one of the law enforcement authority's key hardware provider's, confirmed the deal. Its national marketing manager Dinesh de Silva told ZDNet Australia the Police had already started to implement Windows XP.
At this stage, the cost of the project is unclear. However, de Silva indicated that it was being carried out across all five of NSW Police's administrative regions.
Gianni Guist, AlphaWest account manager responsible for NSW Police contracts, remained tight-lipped about the project today, citing confidentiality agreements between the technology provider and authorities.
Guist said the police was conducting a vast majority of the project internally, while AlphaWest's role was limited to supplying hardware for the roll-out and loading pre-configured software on to the systems from disk images.
De Silva said that NSW Police currently buy their hardware equipment through AlphaWest from three hardware suppliers--Hewlett-Packard provides desktop server systems and laptops, while Optima supplies PC "clone products". The third provider, Toshiba, supplies a small number of portable systems.
Each of the Police's 70 local area commands would make final purchasing decisions based on their budgets, de Silva said.
According to one source, the project is part of a broader government initiative to expand digitisation of Police functions. Once completed, police interviews and other evidence could be stored electronically. The initiative, which would require tighter controls over access to computer resources, may see the expanded use of biometric security apparatuses, and floppy drives replaced by new storage mediums such as encrypted thumb drives.
Microsoft Australia and the police department declined to comment on the project.
What this means
The NSW government has become one of the sites in which Microsoft's domination of desktop applications is facing strong challenges from competing software developers such as Sun Microsystems.
Sun has been growing its relationship with the NSW Department of Public Works and Services since late last year in order to further its campaign to pitch StarOffice--an alternative enterprise software package to Microsoft's Office XP--to chief technical and information officers throughout NSW government departments.
In November, Sun said the NSW government could save just under AU$100 million if it installed StarOffice onto one-third of the 300,000 desktop PCs throughout its departments rather than upgrading their Microsoft products.
Sun's initiative suffered a set-back late January when the company was forced to cancel a meeting it had scheduled with representatives of NSW government IT departments. The cancellation, said the meeting's organiser, Si2, was due in equal parts to a lack of interest from NSW government CIOs and CTOs and poor event management. Si2 said many of the NSW IT department heads were still enjoying Christmas holidays at the time Sun invited them to the meeting.
Sun CEO, Scott McNealy, visiting Australia during a Southeast Asian early last week, outlined the strategy for its upcoming desktop operating system, Mad Hatter. Sun hopes the new OS will be part of a strategy to commoditise computing in which Mad Hatter could be delivered to users as a component of a broadband service on thin-client terminals.
