Anyone have Moved from VMS to WINDOWS?

[Jeff Hoffman]

At 08:38 AM 09-03-05 -0500, Etienne wrote:
>Hi,
>
>We have a application running on OpenVms with RMS files and some COBOL
>programs also. We have a customer that would like to have this application
>running on a Windows server.  We never worked with Powerhouse on Windows so
>we do not know where the difficulties will be...
>
>Anyone ported a complete system from VMS to Windows?  If yes, where were the
>difficulties...
>
>Thanks!

Hi

We converted from VMS/RMS to WINDOWS/MSql Server, we had a lot of batch
processing and generated shell scripts within quick screens.

The DB was created using the output from qshow then tweeked online.

The data was loaded by using qtp to create tab delimit files suitable for
using with sql's bcp (was not documented but still exists) from a batch
script run from a dos window.

One problem was creating fixed length records from dos commands for use in
PH, and also to create variable length records created from PH for the
script files (this was needed as dos does not have a terminator for ending
an environment varaible so when creating a script file from PH by default
the env variable includes the trailing spaces). We wrote a C++ program to
do these conversions (does not need the .net shit, and worked on all our
PC's).

Conversion was just a trudge but was faily simple. The problems came on
testing where we found VMS allowed non unique updates and syntax could be
lax, MS  Sql required unique keys and fully qualified syntax
eg under VMS we could output xxx alias yyyy, under Windoz we has to unclude
the access qualifiers on the output statement. BTW the runtime errors where
not very helpfull, so if you get some strange ones, check the full syntax
is used on output statements.

Printing was a problem, but was solved but printing to a file then printing
the file from dos, this was we could keep out PCL control commands. We
created a printer manager (in PH) to handle deferred printing.

We created out own batch processing system, but running online was
preferrable and simpler to manage and at the time nobody was familiar the
the 'at' command and users where not familiar with managing dos batch queues.

Every body has been happy with the result, 
BUTTTTTTT check how you wish to implement it, 2 basic otptions
 - run on individual PC's in which case you have to licence each and every
PC and re verify licencing if you change PC's
 - run on a citrix or windows server in which case only the server has to
be licenced still need the same number of liceneces but easier to manage.

Anyway ours is working.

LOL

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