DWP Dumps Jobpoints: Too Tight-Fisted to Upgrade.
Over the last few months people commenting here have kept mentioning how Jobpoints are being removed from Jobcentres.
The mystery is now solved.
Obi Wan Kenobi (Guest Post) explains.
Jobpoint systems in Jobcentres being removed:
It’s not that they didn’t want to keep the Jobpoints there, it’s because the DWP are too tight to upgrade the Jobpoints system they were running on.
You see most of the Jobpoints were running on Windows 2000 or Windows XP throughout the entire UK, I have witnessed the start-up routines of these machines and it’s confirmed.
As most of us now know, Microsoft are no longer issuing updates for Windows XP – never mind Windows 2000, for a Jobpoint to work correctly it has to be internet enabled, (and for that the Windows Program has to have all the current security updates installed), because the…
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Mike Sivier's blog 
Makes little difference if the ‘jobcentre’ has a policy of not allowing people into to look for jobs.
Hiya, you don’t know the half of it. Due to the new style of project management brought in by the tories to make things ‘better’ it projects are split up into chunks. Once a project chunk is completed it moves to the next stage. Nothing wrong with that. However if there is a problem with what is delivered, suddenly the team is reassigned and a new team has to be brought in. Again nothing wrong with that. The kicker is that the old team is now ‘uncontactable’ and the new team has to pickup the pieces starting from a position of no knowledge or help from the old team. A nice little earner I understand. The Tories at their brilliant best.
This applies to all Gov. IT contracts. Any wonder why things are the way they are?
I was going to write a response to this but words fail me.
Hiya Mike, don’t bother. There are no words for what the contractors get up too [with our money to boot – low level civil servants angry but unable to get senior mangament to stop signing these stupid contracts] : Mid 1990’s Gov. IT section, Request for Service put in [what a misnomer of a process] for a Mouse… wait for it Cost £25. Day before on Sunday I’d had to buy two for myself and a mate. Cost £3.50 each. You really, really could not make this %$£& up.
Oh, the best one? Contractor paid for for a year/18months [250,000], not seen once in that period.
To be honest I thought (and still do) that one of the reasons (if not the main one) for removing the jobpoints was so that people had no choice but to start using UJM.
20% (DWPs own research) of claimants who turn up at JobCentre Plus offices are IT illiterate.
At the end of last year I was ‘offered’ 8 weeks unpaid work experience in my local Job Centre Plus giving support to people who were IT illiterate to help them set up UJM accounts and other things like Email accounts. I was booked out solid on their single publicly available computer. At the end of the 8 weeks I continued giving these desperate and hounded people this support off my own bat. Just recently it’s been made pretty clear that this kind of help is no longer appreciated by my local Job Centre as people have to keep coming to find me instead of being offered the help by the JC+ itself. In isolation it doesn’t sound much but add in that they’ve removed the free public phones for ringing for jobs and interviews, the removal of the Job Point machines, and the sanctioning regime and it looks like a familiar pattern of setting us up to fail.
It makes me so mad, the government have know intention really helping people get back to work, they give out hugely false statistics re: unemployed, there is a web site you can go on and see the true stats, I’l find it and let you guys know in another e-mail .
There are not the jobs they say there are, its all about controlling the working classes.
The mystery is not solved, the author is clueless about PC hardware, and yes it might be old kit, but I know of some tiny Linux distros that would not only run happily on that kit, but would be faster and more secure than XP or 2000 and the distro is free.
I still run an XP build, I can happily run the latest internet explorer no probs, the OS has nothing to do with it, XP is a still an OK option as it’s lightweight, if its not internet facing you can run it forever and no reason them things need to go online, you run what’s known as a VPN (virtual Private Network) over the net and back to the main server, yes the connection is going over the net, but its inside an encrypted tunnel so it don’t touch the net, most cash points still run on win 2000 via VPN, I know this as my mate works on em, you don’t see banks in a rush to upgrade, I bet the DWP are running VPN, otherwise them things would be forever hacked.
Win 8.1 is win 8 with a free service pack Lol.
hi universal credit is no good either so I expected the same from job centres but if you are signing on they expect you to look for jobs thou