Which way to the Web?

Software Magazine, Sept, 1998 by Mathew Schwartz

For development efforts, the IS department tapped engineering undergraduates. "University," Zucker notes, "is like a prison -- lots of captive, cheap labor." No doubt students entering the workforce might spin it differently. Regardless, they're a group ideally suited to the 5 to 6 month IMS learning curve. And graduates train their replacements.

The initial implementation was quick. "Working with a team of students, Beth was able to knock out a very large system in six months" that contained all the core functionality the university students needed, says Zucker. The hardware investment was two boxes -- one to run the Web server, the other the Opal server, which is also connected to the mainframe via TCP/IP in a terminal session-like mode.

Now, Easy is available in all the student labs, which mostly have PCs, and via every terminal.

That's just the beginning. "We've been adding to it since then, enhancing it," he says. 12,000 students have to interact with the system heavily. It's the only place to vote for student elections, for instance. Or to register for classes.

Not only that, but they can do it over the Web. This is important for the increasing numbers of students who dial in from off-campus. Because of a plug-in on the client side, Opal is essentially client/server -- just over the Web and through the browser, and because it doesn't use HTML, Opal doesn't have any of HTML's graphical limitations. The plug-in also authenticates users when they log on to Easy.

The University of Miami had fewer hardware upgrades to deal with than UHS. It invested in a new Dell server, strictly for project tracking. The ability of Opal to front various applications is also finding use at UM, which runs Ingres, Sybase, and DB2, among other things. Opal is "a nice way to integrate other relational data with legacy data," says Zucker. For the past 10 years, the IS department has tracked detail history, "but it's something we very seldom looked at." Though it's more of a minor application, the server now lets them investigate problems on an ongoing basis.

UM has been pleased with the results. "If you have a legacy application that's fulfilling 90% of the business need and you're just worried about presentation and appearance, this is a great solution," Zucker says.

UM currently has no plans to surrender its mainframe systems, but rather is thinking about how to extend them. Luckily, Year 2000 code remediation was begun in the early 1980s; mainframes are there to stay. "Maybe in ten to fifteen years," says Zucker, "we'll be the last person running mainframe data." Then again, maybe mainframes will be back in vogue.

RELATED ARTICLE: ERP's Hidden Costs

Why is it important to focus on the Quality of the user interface and Browser access to canned reports when you're installing an ERP system? Because if you don't, you're going to find huge cost increases when it comes time to install the system and generate reports.

In a study Lawson Software conducted with Price Waterhouse a few years ago examining how consultancies perform ERP integrations, they found that"30% of the money you're going to spend with them is writing reports that are basically there to extract key performance information for senior management," says Mark Galloway, Lawson's vice president of strategic planning. Curious-- you'd think system integrators Would have more ready-made templates in place. With Lawson, that's "out-of-the-box capability," says Galloway. Once the customer describes their business by setting up a general ledger sheet, it gets key performance information-- in a variety of report formats-- ready to go.