New CIO David Crook did not immediately respond to requests for comments on the project.

Austrade IT Engineer, Tony Van Eyk, said in the past, office managers and trade negotiators around the world had to act as IT managers and manually upgrade each PC.

"With Altiris CMS, users simply click on a link from within their browser which invokes a script that then initiates a complete data backup, software install based on 'personalities', network reconnection, data restore and finally, network logon," Van Eyk said.

Automating the software upgrade and migration also resulted in a reduction in the amount of procedural documents, which had taken up to two weeks to develop. "When the software or migration projects were being done manually by an individual, it was vital that the documents be 100 percent foolproof," Van Eyk said. "That takes a lot of time and effort. Essentially, if anything could conceivably go wrong, the document had to cover it." With the client and server OS migration now complete, Austrade is currently planning a major hardware refresh program, with the help of Altiris' PC Transplant solution.

"Now that we have the PCs migrated to Windows XP, PC Transplant will be used to automate the transfer of files and individual settings to each new PC," Van Eyk said.