A Review on Departmental Windows 95 Implementation

 

Joe Chow

In order to provide an advanced teaching and research computing environment to our staff, the Computing Services Centre has taken a dominant step in the implementation of departmental Windows 95. More than 50 departments were involved and the project spanned over 6 months. It was completed at the end of November. So far, the comments on Windows 95 have been fairly positive. Not only does Windows 95 provide an easy-to-use environment and drastic improvement in speed, it is more stable and reliable than Windows 3.11. The majority of the staff who have experience with Windows 95 are reluctant to revert back to DOS or Windows 3.11 even though they are given a choice. In this article, we will review the status of the implementation and discuss what ought to be done.

Prior to the upgrade of Windows 95 in every department, the Computing Services Centre arranged a forum to explain the various Windows 95 features and the basic requirement of the new system. Departmental users can air their concerns such as hardware compatibility problems and share their views with each other. CSC staff would note down the specific departmental requirements and take that into consideration during the upgrade. To ensure that staff can migrate smoothly to Windows 95, training courses were offered to get them familiarize with the new system. These courses will be run continuously throughout the year to make sure that no one misses.

Popular applications such as MS Office 7.0 and 32-bit Internet browser are available under Windows 95. With the streamlining of software installations procedures, staff have more flexibility to install applications into their local Windows 95 system by themselves. This service is not provided under Windows 3.11 due to the instability of Windows 3.11. The support effort will be too much.

Some problems are still left unresolved. Applications such as EIS system and some library provided CD-ROM database programs cannot be transferred from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 environment. We anticipate that the problem will be resolved when Windows 95 version of those software is released.

One piece of encouraging news is that the programming of the personal menu system was done and it was successfully integrated into our Windows 95 CityU Menu System. Similar to the previous DOS version, a user can extract his/her favourite items under the CityU Main Menu into his/her own personal menu so that he/she can save time on finding out his/her favourite applications from a long list under the Main Menu.

Our work is no way near the end. When the implementation is completed, we target to port hundreds of software from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 such that they can be accessed through the network. By that time, applications will run under dual environment (Windows 3.11 and Windows 95).

Lastly, CSC would like to thank all the participants in this project, especially departments who joined the pilot test and those who contributed their precious comments. Without their support, the implementation would not have run smoothly.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk