Click here for St. Paul Software Sponsor Message

3000 sites prepare for Year 2000 with tools, confidence

Experts agree that many companies aren't paying enough attention yet

Go to Year 2000 Information Site

It's a question that may become the icebreaker for 1997's computer meetings: What are you doing about your Year 2000 conversion?

The answers can vary widely for HP 3000 customers. A great many of them will say "leaving it to my application providers and HP to work on," and be completely justified in their approach. Many HP 3000s operate in environments where customers don't work much with the internals of their systems.

Many other customers, however, face significant work in preparing for the century change. These are sites with applications they've built themselves, or in more complicated circumstances, built by MIS staff no longer working for the company. For this kind of HP 3000 shop, a thorough look at date handling routines and data fields is a major part of preparing their HP 3000s for January 1, 2000.

Customers using applications from outside suppliers can only watch and wait on the engineering needed to make their operations Year 2000 compliant. We're beginning a regular feature starting this month on Year 2000 compliance reports from the active HP 3000 application and tools providers. Vendors who have news to report can contact us to help spread the word about how ready they are for the century change.

Steve Cooper, a principal at Allegro Consultants who prepared a white paper on the subject for HP, said the HP 3000 is in better shape than many operating systems. The readiness of its customers is another matter.

"I don't think the 3000 is in particularly bad shape for Year 2000," he said. "On the contrary, MPE/iX is in much better shape than most operating systems. The problem, though, is in the applications. I fear that many sites have not given this adequate attention and will be in for a very rude awakening as the day approaches. Remember, to fix this right, you need to change all of your sources, copylibs, database schemas and data at the same time -- not one program at a time."

Cooper, like other experienced programming managers, believes a different kind of dedication will be required to handle the Year 2000. "Computer people are used to missing deadlines," he said. "This one will not slip, I promise you. In the best of cases, there is a lot of work to do. But I regularly run into shops that have programs with missing source code, or sources that they swear are in production that won't even compile. What are these shops to do? For some nonzero percentage of the sites out there, 3000 or otherwise, the problem will turn out to be immense, and I am sure there will be many bankruptcies and lawsuits as a result."

"To date, we have just fixed a handful of date routines to stop rejecting 00 as an invalid year, and have guided some sites on how to simplify their repair process. I see few shops doing the thorough review that is probably called for."

Applications ready
Two suppliers still notable for landing new customers on HP 3000s are ready today, and have been for some time. Amisys Managed Care Systems and Smith Gardner & Associates both report that their applications, in healthcare and direct mail marketing, are already Year 2000 compatible.

Smith-Gardner's software, MACS, has always been Year 2000 ready. "MACS was developed in the 90's," said president Allan Gardner, "and we knew we would be around through the Year 2000, so we took care of the issue in the design." MACS I specified all dates with seven positions, with the first position being the century. MACS II shifted to the more standard 8-position (ccyymmdd). Since the application doesn't need to deal with dates that span over 100 years, it can logically determine the century and therefore is not dependent on any changes to HP intrinsics.

MANMAN sites using version 7.0 or later have an application that supports dates to the year 2050, because the original architect of the application had all earlier versions stop accepting dates beyond the end of 1993. This gave customers a seven-year window to get ready for the date change.

Terry Floyd, CEO of manufacturing support agency The Support Group, said a minor, non-mission critical MANMAN fix is being added to Version 11.0 to change the way the application stores fiscal periods. This part of MANMAN financials is stored as MMYY now, making sorting the periods over the millennium change impossible.

Customers using QueryCalc from AICS Research can support dates to the year 9999. Wirt Atmar of AICS and Vladimir Volokh of Vesoft were checking the date functions of their software against one another at the latest HP World conference. Volokh proposed that a date in the 83rd century was a Wednesday according to his MPEX software. Atmar checked with QueryCalc and verified that was indeed the day of the week.

PowerHouse is Year 2000 ready now, thanks to 4 digit year support and other features like ADD CENTURY that have been in the 4GL since the 1980s. The new 8.1 release of PowerHouse will include features such as a optional pop-up CENTURY window, planned for beta testing late summer. Powerhouse will also be releasing Power2000, a special workbench that runs against PowerHouse code to test its date fields, which goes into field testing this month for release by March.

Tools are available
Some customers don't view getting ready for a century change to be anything different from regular maintenance. David Vivino, MIS manager for international publisher Numa Corp. of Akron, Ohio, said the project is important, but not any more so than other operations at his site.

"This will be a large system enhancement for us," Vivino said. "It certainly isn't insurmountable, however. It is like any other modification which involves database and program changes. We'll follow the same analytical and preparatory processes as we've done successfully in the past with this kind of change. We won't need any special or new-fangled tools. We are getting set to begin the project in 1997."

The tools available are increasing in number on a weekly basis, and several are already available for HP 3000 customers. Diamond Optimum Systems supplies tools that can help identify all programs and jobs in your MPE/iX systems that may be affected by the Year 2000. Diamond Optimum's Version Control System/3000 and Documentation/3000 access an Impact Analysis engine to provide what the company calls D-Day 2000 routines.

Once managers locate date fields in databases and identify the format that is used, Adager's new EXAMINE DATE and CHANGE DATE functions can help. EXAMINE DATE can verify the contents of date fields. It can log all dates that fulfill certain "exception" criteria that a manager may specify such as null, zero, blank, or invalid. Since many HP 3000 customers have overloaded date values, they can ask Adager to accept them. They can also log all dates within or outside of a given range. This functionality is of great value to "inventory" date-oriented values, whether users decide to convert them or not.

Another new Adager command, CHANGE DATE, works with the information provided by EXAMINE DATE, so you can easily configure Change Date to convert the formats of your date-oriented data items as well as all of your dataset field values. Joe Geiser, principal at the newly founded client-server consultancy CSI Business Solutions, says the Adager tools are a real time saver (see sidebar).

An early success
One HP 3000 shop is far more than ready to work on the problem -- its Year 2000 work is already complete, spanning more than 350 COBOL programs. Steve Tvedt, an information systems VP for a Southern California insurance company, also suspects that "many companies are not taking this seriously. We had to do it this year because we write many three-year policies, and renewals were coming around in January."

Tvedt's company began planning a year ago, and completed the project in four months with four senior programmer analysts and other technical support staff. In early October the company transformed its 10 databases and copied over from its new code account all the applications, copylibs and jobs into production accounts. About one half-million lines of code, all in either COBOL or Speedware, were studied and modified as necessary.

Tvedt said that he also found Adager's utilities saved many days of work in the effort. Adager made an early beta version available to help during the migration weekend. "Without this effort from Adager we would have added at least a month of extra effort to changing the databases," he said. "Many shops will benefit from their efforts and our persistence. Other products that we used were the Facade client server editor -- our COBOL programmers love it -- and Fantasia forms design and printing."

Like many experts, Tvedt's report from the front lines indicates that early analysis of the project made preparing for the Year 2000 on his HP 3000 a success. "Planning was the key, and my confidence in the team members added to their belief in themselves," he said. Now we're catching up on the backlog and planning our next year's projects."


Copyright 1997, The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved.