Founded in 1967, South Orange County Community College District (SOCCCD) is one of 72 community college districts in the State of California. A multi-campus district, SOCCCD employs over 2,300 employees and manages approximately 36,000 students per semester through Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College and the Advanced technology & Education Park.
Jim Laurie, Human Resources Information Systems Manager, SOCCCD
One of the key administrative applications for SOCCCD is a Human Resources System (HRS). Built in the 1980s, the HRS is a character-based, custom application using Cognos PowerHouse® and running on HP VAX OpenVMS servers. The information associated with over 2,000 employees is managed in the HRS which tracks the movement of every employee within the district. Some of the sub systems include key functions such as budgeting, personnel, payroll, health and safety and security. There were three main problems associated with this critical and complex system:
SOCCCD needed a solution with a modern architecture that could preserve 100% of the custom-built application functionality they relied on, delivered as soon as possible. The solution needed to be both cost-effective and low risk, causing minimal disruption on the end-users. And, they also needed a robust platform that could support on-going future enhancements to the system.
SOCCCD looked at two alternatives for its application migration – buy or migrate.
SOCCCD chose CORE Migration because of the company’s expertise with PowerHouse and proven technology in migrating PowerHouse applications to a modern .NET platform. In addition, CORE’s Renaissance Architect™ Framework guaranteed SOCCCD that 100% of the HRS’ existing functionality would be preserved while providing flexibility for future enhancements and customizations. CORE Migration’s automated migration process and training provided SOCCCD with a low risk and cost-effective alternative to buy or build.
Jim Laurie, Human Resources Information Systems Manager, SOCCCD
GCG needed to be closely involved with the migration process. Given their experience with the legacy system, the technical skills sets within their team and that they would continue to support their client, GCG chose CORE’s Self-Directed Migration Method.
Core Migration’s Self-Directed Method is broken down into logical elements depicting the various stages of the migration process. The CORE Migration team completed the initial stage of the migration process called Design Preservation. Once this stage was completed, CORE trained GCG’s staff on the Forward Engineering Toolkit which covers a broad spectrum of training from migration methodology from User Interface Training to deployment and maintenance management. During the Forward Engineering stage, GCG could access the repository from their site via a secure portal. The repository contained all the business logic and rules from GCG’s client’s application (populated in the Design preservation stage). GCG was able to use the forward engineering of the legacy source code, which is stored in the repository, to the target technology. The GCG team was able to easily follow the later phases of the migration from Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Acceptance Testing to Implementation.
The CORE Migration team completed the database migration from RMS (non-relational) and RDB on the OpenVMS to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on Windows. Transact SQL procedures were created in order to update data in the underlying database. CORE ensured SOCCCD’s IT staff who are responsible for the maintenance and enhancements of the migrated application were fully trained and confident with CORE’s Renaissance Architect development tools.
The new environment is Microsoft .NET 2005 using CORE’s Renaissance Architect framework for .NET coupled with the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Dan Johnson, Senior Programmer/ Analyst, SOCCCD
In early 2008, SOCCCD went live with their new HRS. CORE Migration’s training, technology and tools were instrumental in ensuring a successful migration and preparing SOCCCD’s IT team to successfully support, maintain and enhance the application. And, feedback to date has been very positive from the end users.