Bank of Sharjah, a leading corporate and retail bank in the UAE, has upgraded its ATM network to Windows 7 using provider of self-service banking solutions CR2’s technology.

Microsoft announced in 2007 that it would no longer offer support to Windows XP, the system powering more than 95 per cent of the world's ATMs after April this year.

The announcement, stating that Microsoft would no longer be providing security updates or technical support for XP, meant operators would find it increasingly difficult to support their systems and ensure sufficient software security, said a statement.

However, for a huge proportion of banks, the cost and time involved in upgrading their systems to Windows 7 remains a significant challenge.

For Bank of Sharjah, using CR2's BankWorld to manage and monitor their ATM network from a single point has enabled a speedy and simplified roll out of the Windows 7 upgrade.

Bank of Sharjah is using CR2's existing Windows-based BankWorld ATM Client solution on their ATM network, which has facilitated a swift migration to Windows 7.

The migration followed advanced certification testing of the Windows 7 platform, which was undertaken at the ATM labs of CR2 located in Dublin, Ireland.

By maintaining the services interface and functions cross-platform, BankWorld can be run on both XP and Windows 7-enabled ATMs with no changes required on the BankWorld server. - TradeArabia News Service