Strategic Positioning of ISM*Migration
Design Principles
Upon setting up the design principles of a migration process
we think that the
following rules should be followed:
- Migrate all the elements of an application
to the new environment with the benefits of its modern native
technology options.
- Reduce the cost of both migration
and ongoing maintenance by our joint
thorough analysis, understanding
and mining of the business
rules.
- Create a 24 – 7 application whenever
and wherever possible.
- Create a data model which is transparent
to the end user and administrator and overcomes all restrictions
of the older products.
- Offer an environment which as a whole offers the lowest
Cost of
Ownership.
- Take care of language support.
- Open interfaces to other (primarily Oracle)
applications
- Implement a State-of-the-Art Browser front-end technology
1. Create a 24 – 7 Application: available 24 hours
7 days a week
At all installations of our major customers the database normally
never has to be stopped to perform any maintenance task for their
main applications. Online Backup is used by the customer to perform
the backup tasks.
The various application tasks will be analysed carefully in order
to find out if any tasks may conflict with the goal for 24 –7.
2. Create a Transparent Data Model for End Users and
Administrators
We always put special emphasis on the naming convention of tables
and table columns. Upon introducing new objects we carefully decide
for the name of these items. The users may use the standard SQL-language
of Oracle® or a graphic tool for accessing the data base and
the whole data model may be accessed by the “qualified user”
in read-only mode.
3. Lowest Cost of Ownership
This target has been the main reason why client-server mode has
not been chosen for our migration strategy and we immediately
switched to the Browser Front-end Technology.
Please refer to our ISM*WebForms Data Sheet which
gives an overview of this tool.
4. Language Support
From the very beginning, we try to provide the possibility of
supporting any language that is
- Supported by the Oracle® RDBMS, and
- Supported on the PC
The increase in programming efforts is minimal compared to the
advantages that are gained.
5. Open Interfaces to other Applications
We always design a special set of interfaces to import and export
data to other applications inside or outside the customer’s
business world. In the typical realworld customer situation, about
90 to 95 % of the transactions are performed in the background
as batch processes. This is the reason why normally the area of
batch processing has to be examined extremely carefully.
6. State-of-the-Art Browser Front-End Technology
I SM*WebForms uses an internet browser as the
display tool on a PC. Either
Microsoft® Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Netscape
are supported at this point
of time.
7. Reference Projects
Our transfer methodology was tested successfully when making
a HP-3000-application Year-2K-ready in 1999 for 2 customers, the
District Court of Vienna and the Public
Attorneys of Vienna. We transferred the programs to a
Unix-server with the Oracle RDBMS. The cost involved was 18%
less than the cost of a “traditional” conversion on
the HP-3000 with COBOL, IMAGE and VPLUS.
