The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM) is set to abandon issuing staff with BlackBerry smartphones as the council looks to move towards a Windows 8-based ecosystem.
It forms part of RBWM's overall strategy of moving towards a smarter working environment, which, when implemented, would make it the first local government authority to operate entirely within the cloud.
"We're looking to roll out Windows 8 phones moving away from the current BlackBerry, obviously with the security wrapper around that piece as well. And we have access via the smarter working project and the desktop refresh gives the ability for users to work remotely," Dan Brookman, RBWM's chief architect told Computing.
And with the authority's infrastructure based around Microsoft devices and applications, Brookman sees no reason why Windows 8 would not be installed across RBWM in future.
"We've signed up to the enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so there's no reason we wouldn't investigate a Windows 8 rollout but that would probably be at least 24 months away," he said.
Despite the launch of the new BB10 interface and a range of smartphones earlier this year, BlackBerry is still struggling to compete with Apple and Google Android in the mobility sphere. Indeed, a number of US government agencies dropped the old BlackBerry models, instead choosing to issue staff with iPhones.
However, BlackBerry recently claimed that things are on the up, with 60 per cent of top US firms using devices running on BB10.
