Conversion Effectiveness Demystified
Introduction to the Five Step Process
Before embarking on a significant migration project, an organization must be aware of potentially significant challenges in project management and project implementation. Lack of migration experience may cause these challenges only to become apparent in the middle of a migration project.
However, when expected and planned these challenges become opportunities for organizations to learn, grow, and improve. Compatible compilers and porting/migration/emulation tools provide the solution for the obvious technical problems when moving from one operating platform to another. Technical problems, while important, are only part of a business-critical migration project.
Our porting tools for almost all of the major OpenVMS based languages (C, FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, BLISS, MACRO, ADA, PL/I, PASCAL) provide a rapid path to new platforms, minimizing the potential re-engineering of hundreds of thousands of lines of source code. We have now re-applied the experience of porting our own tools to various platforms to expand our offerings to provide Unix to Unix migrations as well.
To complement the aspect of language migration, Sector7 has a suite of APIs for Linux/UNIX and NT that replaces the most commonly used OpenVMS system service routines -- one of the major obstacles in migrating from OpenVMS to another platform.
To provide a familiar working environment for users, we also provide tools that replicate the functionality of DCL (Digital command language) including batch & print spooling. Various tools that provide OpenVMS compatible functionality such as editors, mail and backup are also available.
The most valuable asset of any client is their data, so we also provide tools that will convert existing OpenVMS data sets to one compatible with the new working environment.
Where there is no fit with any existing tools or methodologies to achieve the migration, our engineers can develop the necessary tools to achieve this – our aim is to provide a complete solution.
Once the application is migrated to a new host, the new development environment is similar to that used under the original environment, providing a ‘comfort-zone’ for programmers. Where possible/appropriate, the look and feel of the original application is retained, reducing retraining for users of the migrated application.