A Place to Make Plans for Transition
October 23, 2013
Websites offer a world of advice on how to move toward the future with ease. There's nothing easier than tapping a webinar to find out more about making an HP 3000 transition. And no company has even come within several leagues of teaching with webinars like MB Foster does.
Wednesdays are the regular date, with the presentations starting at 2PM Eastern US time. Today's talk, with an interactive segment as well (Birket Foster asks for questions throughout) is on Application Decommissioning. Even at a place where the 3000 is likely to run another four years, like MacLean-Fogg manufacturers, a custom MPE app will go out of production mode, someday.
Today's talk (register at the MB Foster website, and get your audio via IP or phone) focuses on the legacy data process and compliance issues in your plans for such a decommission. That data will be moving forward, just as surely as those disk packs at MacLean-Fogg moved on to the next 3000 after a flood. Data always moves onward, but it's no easy task without planning.
"In a time when cost cutting is a necessity, decommissioning legacy application data offers companies cost savings, and resource efficiencies," Foster's website proposes, "all while meeting compliance for your business and legal requirements to retain and access data."
The company's been illuminating the key issues that can serve both homesteading and migration missions. Sometimes this kind of modernization serves homesteading, and then modernization. The list of what's been covered over the last five years of webinars is impressive. There's two more on the way, November 6 and November 20.
November 6 covers Automating Windows Processes and Batch Jobs: learn how you can automate windows processes and manage data processing jobs (scripts), view output, maintain complex scheduling dependencies and relationships easily and effectively. People try to do this after a transition using Windows Task Manager, which lets you schedule many tasks. It's no substitute for the power and control you enjoyed on the HP 3000.
On November 6 the webinar covers Measuring for Meaning, KPI's, Dashboards and ODS. That last acronym stands for Operational Data Stores. KPIs provide visibility into a business’s vital signs, using metrics and dashboards. Moving to bigger-scope IT, which is usually part of a migration or modernization, introduces an IT pro to these strategies.
Many other subjects have been part of the webinar curriculum. Data migration challenges, including a live demonstration of a copy between an HP 3000 IMAGE database to a SQL Server database. Another talk shared data migration best practices. Last year you could learn about the advances in the new Eloquence database and language. The drop-in replacement for IMAGE at migrating 3000 sites gained full text search in the database.
There was a look at the elements of Big Data as they relate to IT planning. For homesteaders, issues got examined on how to transition supporting your customer applications for HP 3000s. 3000 sites are still renewing commitments to using the server for another 3-5 years. A company with experience in serving customers through applications can help companies extend the life of their systems.
There's also been scheduling challenges for Windows managers, synchronization of data. Tips on decommissioning of data. How to plan for Mean Time To Recovery of Operations. Spend about 45 minutes on some Wednesday, today or soon, and get to the place where transition planning sets up shop.