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If we had a category for Pain in the Neck of the Year, the year-2000 problem would be the winner hands down. In fact, it would probably win every year from 1996 to 2000. As with any calamity, carpetbaggers are crawling out of the woodwork. Some of the year-2000 vendors we've talked to seem like the same people who would follow Midwestern hail storms in order to install roofs. However, sifting through the year-2000 hype, we found a few good products that actually do more good than harm in their quest to flush out your millennial woes. We'll focus on three here: MicroFocus tools that analyze Cobol applications; the Discover Series that sorts out year-2000 issues in client/server applications; and Check 2000 that analyzes the impact of the problem on your desktop PCs.
Beyond the next millenniumWe like the first two year-2000 products because they are useful long after Jan. 1, 2000. In fact, if you want to find the silver lining in the year-2000 cloud, look at what you can do with an in-depth understanding of the legacy applications that have been accumulating in your organization for years.A tangled mass of applications will seem much less daunting when you've thoroughly inventoried, analyzed, and documented them. You'll be able to eliminate dead code, understand past programmers' intentions in their code, and even migrate from the dead-end platform left behind by the three IT managers who came before you. To that end, we like year-2000 tools that offer more than just year-2000 features. The best representative that we've seen is the family of products from MicroFocus. These tools dissect a Cobol application to its component pieces and show the relationships between them; this line of products is without parallel. Of course, they run on Windows, which will mean a big change for many shops with mainframe in their blood. But hey, you'll need something nice and GUI-friendly to keep all those Generation Xers who will be programming for you soon interested in your accounts-receivable applications anyway. Learn more about MicroFocus at http://www.microfocus.com.
Client/Server vivisectionThe same model applies to the client/server side. What good is a year-2000 solution that leaves you with the same mess you had when you started? Again, we looked for tools that had more to offer than just changing "YY" to "YYYY."We found a doozy. The Discover series of products, from Software Emancipation Technology, offers a "development information system" for understanding your client/server applications. The tool breaks down applications written in C and C++, as well as other common client/server languages, into its component pieces, then it maps out how an application works. When you change one function in the application, you can instantly see the results of your change throughout. There are numerous tools for harnessing the power of Discover to fix the year-2000 problem. And when you've finished fixing year-2000 issues, you can rest assured that handling the next catastrophic bug that comes down the pike will be child's play. Details about the Discover series can be found at http://www.setech.com.
BIOS HazardAlthough Cobol gets most of the blame for year-2000 grief, the lowly desktop PC has often been overlooked as a harbinger of millennial doom. The fact is, there are enough year-2000 issues lurking on your cute little PC to keep you up past midnight for most of 2000.Bad BIOSes, suboptimal operating systems, and abhorrent applications could come together to make your New Year's hangover last well into May. For IT managers, the problem is multiplied by the number of desktops you have in the organization. But there's hope. There are several products available to assess the year-2000 problem on a PC BIOS. Of these, the best that we've seen is Check 2000, from Greenwich Mean Time. Check 2000 not only tests a PC BIOS for year-2000 compliance, it also examines the OS and applications, then lists any issues that it finds. Check 2000's top feature is the fact that the Client/Server version will save results on a network drive. In addition, it comes with analysis tools that report the results for all of the users on a network. Check 2000 represents a simple, elegant approach to addressing year-2000 issues on the desktop. For more information, go to http://www.gmt-2000.com. Here's another tip: If your organization hasn't started addressing the year 2000, find another place to work. To read more of Eric Hammond's analyses of year 2000 solutions, see: Cure for the uncommon test, Debacle on the desktop, Disarming the 2000 bomb and Worry like it's 1999. For tests of current year 2000 snags, read: JavaScript hits snag and Year-2000 bug bites Novell.
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