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New Year 1998
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Gravesham Borough Council migrated to Universe on NT to cut annual hardware costs and provide a totally integrated solution for its users
Gravesham Borough Council is a medium-sized district council with a population of 96,000 and an administrative workforce of around 500. Although the Council’s annual expenditure on IT compared very favourably with similar authorities a considerable sum was being spent on leasing mini-computers to run Pick-based corporate applications. The contract for these computers was due to expire in June 1997.
Around the middle of 1995 IT staff were actively considering the options for the future with the aim of creating a strategy to achieve our vision of a completely integrated desktop for users. In particular we were looking at the options for the corporate applications and whether it was feasible to run these, along with other network services, from a file server.
Gravesham had for some time adopted a policy of sourcing applications and hardware from different suppliers and in addition a good proportion of the corporate applications were written in-house. This avoids the problem of ‘supplier lock-in’ where hardware contracts are difficult to break because the supplier will not permit their software to run on any other supplier’s hardware.
We engaged consultants to assist us (TNFour Computer Systems) who were database migration specialists, had extensive Pick knowledge and were a Microsoft Solution Provider. After considerable investigation of the alternatives including Advanced Pick (now D3), Unidata and Universe, a decision was made to migrate the corporate applications to the Universe database. A major factor in the decision was the fact that Universe had been ported to Windows NT Server some 18 months previously and was now a stable product in that environment. None of the alternative Pick-type databases considered could offer this and NT was important to us since we have extensive Microsoft skills but little Unix experience. At the same time we were considering options for terminal emulation which resulted in the selection of wIntegrate.
The main migration project commenced in October 1996 and finished at the end of April 1997. During that period DATABASIC code from the in-house applications was converted using software that identified and changed syntax differences between DATABASIC and Universe BASIC. We had already confirmed that third-party suppliers could offer a Universe version of their systems. Data was loaded and user staff were extensively involved in testing the systems in the new Universe environment. At the end of April 1997 we were satisfied all was ready and the final transfer of data was undertaken over the weekend such that Monday morning staff were working live in the Universe database.
As one would expect we had a few minor hiccups during the early weeks but all problems were essentially of a minor nature. The hardware platform running Universe is a Viglen Propenta server, dual Pentium Pro with 256 Mb RAM and 10Gb disk configured as Raid 5. It cost less than one month’s rental for the mini-computers we were using before. We have around 150 concurrent users typically accessing Universe at any one time. Performance is excellent with improvements in processing times of the order of 100 times faster.
We now have a totally integrated operating environment with all applications from word processing to Council Tax administration running on the NT network. All staff use PCs running Windows 95 which enables them to access any application or information source they require. We consider we have an extremely cost-effective IT service which does not compromise in any way on functionality and, importantly, has enabled us to continue to use a Pick-type database to underpin the major applications.
Robin Daly
IT Services Manager
Gravesham Borough Council
Last Updated: 29 July 1999