Arch Communications calls on the OLE DB Provider for DB2 to streamline data exchange and improve customer service - Product Information

ENT, March 8, 2000

As one of the largest providers of paging and wireless communications, Arch Communications is committed to maintaining the highest level of performance and customer service. To help achieve this goal, it implemented a solution using the OLE DB Provider for DB2 in Microsoft(R) SNA Server to simplify development of automated tasks and of Web-based applications that enable external resellers to access the most current account and product information to serve customers more quickly and efficiently.

Situation

A merger between Arch Communications Group, Inc. and MobileMedia Corporation (MobileComm), completed in June 1999, made Arch Communications the second largest paging and wireless communications company in the United States, with seven million units in service throughout all 50 states.

In 1996 the company deployed SNA Server, primarily for its Call Center customer service agents in Dallas. The goal was to provide those agents with more consistent access to AS/400 data, overcoming a dismal 25 percent uptime record resulting from a wide area network that still included Davox terminals and experienced constant outages.

With the SNA Server implementation, Arch used SNA Server's Advanced Program-to-Program Communication (APPC) programming library to write applications that handle interactive tasks between the AS/400 and the network. However, this method was complex and growing competition raised the need to make more information available to its internal agents and external resellers. As a result, Arch began to look for ways to add functionality to streamline operations and make maximum use of its DB2 database information. It wanted to automate nightly database refreshes between DB2 and its Oracle database and to make its DB2 information even more accessible both to Call Center customer service agents and its resellers across the country

"One of the primary reasons we implemented SNA Server in the beginning is that our existing IP implementation required a lot of overhead," says Mike Pristow. "SNA Server helped to reduce that by reducing the administration time and minimizing memory requirements on the AS/400."

When SNA Server 4.0 SP2 was released with the OLE DB Provider to DB2, the company upgraded immediately. The chief reasons for implementing the OLE DB provider were to automate Arch's nightly database updates and to add more customer service applications with less programming.

More Efficient Access to DB2 Data

Arch's implementation team installed the SNA Server upgrade on the server computers, selected auto configuration for the AS/400, and had the server computers communicating with the AS/400 system within a day. Then it installed the OLE DB Provider for DB2 using the documentation to learn how to setup a connection properly using the schema, package collection, and related configuration options to access the AS/400 tables. 'Setting up the OLE DB Provider took about 30 minutes," recalls Wendell Pinegar, manager of client/server programming at Arch Communications.

One of the first projects for the OLE DB Provider to DB2, was to create an application to funnel data back and forth from the AS/400 to an Oracle database that supports Arch Communications' retail group in the Call Center. The retail group activates new customer accounts using a graphical front end to the Oracle database. Both the AS/400 and Oracle databases are refreshed every night. Before the OLE DB Provider for DB2 was available, these downloads were performed using the IBM ODBC driver and required operator intervention. The operator would have to wait for one process to finish before starting another which took a lot of extra time.

Also there were random breakages of the account activations going to the AS/400. "The programs would fail. The operators would have to reboot those systems constantly. It was a big problem that we resolved with SNA Server," Pinegar explains.

Pinegar and his team rewrote the interface to convert the nightly downloads from a manual process into an automated process that uses the OLE DB Provider for DB2. "Now it's all done using a Visual Basic-based tool. The application installs as a service and downloads the tables that need to be refreshed on a nightly basis, with no operator intervention," Pinegar says.

Better Control of Pagers and Account Information

The OLE DB Provider for DB2 also has enabled Arch to set up an application to encrypt its pagers. Motorola provides the option for vendors to program its pagers with a password to prevent theft by not allowing the pager's frequency to be changed. Arch needed to store the encrypted pager passwords on the AS/400 system and provide its reprogrammers access to that information. Its solution was to create an encryption support Active Server Page application that the programmers access through their browser.

When they need to reprogram an encrypted pager they go to the encryption support application, scan in the pager's serial number and select the equipment from the AS/400 database. The application then retrieves the seed value information on that pager and generates the correct password to unlock it.