Silver Bullet Follow Up

I realize you may be tired of hearing about this, but I feel it necessary to
complete the report.

Today, Dan Harrow and his partner invited some companies in to see a demo of
this product - "The Millennium Silver Bullet for the AS/400" or MSB/400. I'll
summarize the results from my notes. Disclaimer: I may have misunderstood
parts of the demonstration. Anything I misunderstood I will publicly
acknowledge:


- The product converts dates within a physical file on an AS/400, and
rebuilds all of the logicals (indices) over them. I don't have a list of the
date fields offered, but I do recall him showing two, four, and six digit
dates. Dan mentioned that he handles ISO, L-date, packed, and customer
defined formats, among others.


- The product produces a report of the files changed, and the logicals
rebuilt.
- There are plans of building a report which will list the lines of code
effected by the file changes, so the programmer can go in and manually change
the code.
- There are plans to build a version for non-US date standards.
- For beyond 2000, the Ammo box will provide tools for file conversion that
can be used for such tasks as Euro-money conversion.


- There is a limit of 35 fields available for date fields. Each of these has
to be hand entered, telling the program where they reside. There is no
interface to any impact analysis tool.
- The program is totally dependent upon field reference files. If you do not
have field reference files, you cannot use the program.
- The program will not handle S/36 files nor the S/36 environment.
- The program will not make any program changes.
- The program will only run on OS/400 V3R2 or above. There is no backward
compatibility.
- Source is not available to value-added resellers. Any improvements must be
completed by Info-Tech.


- The claim to change 100% of dates was mollified. The current claim is that
the product handles 100% of the dates tested. They do not guarantee to
convert 100% of the dates in the field.
- The claim to not need an impact analysis was explained. They regard an
impact analysis as a report of how much code will have to be modified to
become Y2K compliant. They are not aware of having to deal with a business
impact analysis.
- One of the attendees suggested that a better name would be the Silver
Shovel. He quickly tried to put a positive spin on the comment, though.
- Windowing is ignored by the product. The long term plans for the product
include being used by those people after 1/1/2000. They apparently will need
the product to save them from the problems involved in windowing.
Encapsulation wasn't mentioned.

Because of restrictions on the lists, I cannot post the price and
availability. However, you can e-mail me directly to get that information.

Hope this was useful.

Hank Heath
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