Irish divisions star in Windows 7 campaign

KARLIN LILLINGTON

THREE EUROPEAN Development Centre divisions of Microsoft Ireland – Biometrics Support, the EDC TV Group, and Mobile Broadband – contributed to features in Windows 7, including biometric support for fingerprint readers, support for European television and mobile applications support.

The unprecedented level of Irish involvement in the development of such a product is the result of the changing face of Microsoft here, from an initial focus on lower-level activities like localisation to high-end projects like software development for Windows, Microsoft’s flagship product.

The European Development Centre has moved from 7 per cent working in core development in 2005 to about 30 per cent today.

“It’s interesting to have Ireland as part of the core development for Windows. That really shows how the technology environment here has changed,” says Microsoft Ireland country manager Paul Rellis.

“What has happened is that, in the last five to six years, we’ve built up our developer expertise and moved out some of our localisation expertise.”

The Dublin R&D centre was announced in 2005 and marked the first large-scale development activity at Microsoft Ireland.

Rellis says that the increased level of product development in Ireland marks Microsoft “as a company growing up and realising a need to be closer to a market, to develop for a global market”.

While most work on Windows 7 was based at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, many elements went to Microsoft’s international development groups. Of about 1,200 employees at Microsoft’s south Dublin campus, 1,000 were involved with the roll-out of Windows 7. These include employees in the European development centre, the European operations centre and the marketing group.

“For the first time, Windows has native support for biometrics,” says Pieter Kasselman, head of Biometrics Support, EDC. This enables Windows users to log on to their PC, encrypt USB key drives, and access files and applications using the swipe of a finger.

Using Irish-developed features, parents can set up permissions for children on home PCs, businesses can lock down data or key drives, and any computer user can get rid of the need to type in usernames and passwords, Kasselman says. He says Microsoft wanted to incorporate biometrics for any computer user, not just the corporate user, so support is fully integrated into Windows 7.

The TV group, which worked on elements of Vista, the previous version of Windows, began development of the latest television features in Windows 7 as far back as 2005, says Renaud Bordelet, head of the TV group.

“What we’ve delivered on is new ways of watching TV, using Windows Media Centre. We focused on anything, anytime, anywhere.” Windows Media Centre was included in Vista but wasn’t widely used in Europe outside of the UK, because it lacked support for many European TV formats, he says.

The new version can pull in data from many sources to enable a user to get background detail on films and shows, such as actors, year of production, film reviews and ratings.

The media centre application can use analogue, digital, premium TV or satellite sources for TV and lets a computer user record and archive shows to a hard drive, Kasselman says.

So what’s it like to see Irish-built features in Microsoft’s most visible product? “There is nothing quite like seeing your feature in Windows,” says Kasselman.

Getting the product out to vendor outlets is the final piece in the long production timeline of a major operating system release, and Irish employees will push out over a million copies of Windows 7 for the launch this week.

The process goes back over 12 months, with the European operations centre staff working on packaging design and launch logistics with European partners. At the start, only half a dozen Microsoft Ireland employees were involved, but that has swelled to as many as 30 for the launch.

“We’re covering everything from the Nordic countries to South Africa to the Middle East,” says Dave Williams, head of software, manufacturing and planning for the European operations centre. “And all of that will come out of Ireland.”

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times