News & Eventi – tcACCESS User Symposium 2011

The 7th meeting of B.O.S. customers was held in Munich on May 19 and 20. The meeting place was at the angelo Designhotel. Like all other past Symposiums the User Symposium was jointly conducted by B.O.S. and the User Community. Users of the tcACCESS product as well as customers using tcVISION attended the conference. The highlights of the 2 days have been the presentations from users and the announcements made by B.O.S. for the new versions of tcACCESS (Version 9) and tcVISION (Version 4 and 5).

B.O.S. presented the companies activities over the past 2 years. New distribution partners in Australia, the US and Europe have been welcomed aboard. These partners guarantee the world-wide success of the B.O.S. solutions and the partners have been very successful by constantly increasing the number of new customers across the globe.

Mr. Andreas Stempel from himolla presented the usage of tcACCESS with DL/I databases. ( "Hierarchical data in a relational view"). Mr. Stempel talked about the experiences of himolla with tcACCESS. Originally himolla, located in Taufkirchen, Bavaria, planned a migration from DL/I to a relational database. After a thorough research the decision was made to stay with DL/I because a migration was too costly in terms of labor and money and himolla started to look for a solution that provided a relational access to DL/I. The solution was tcACCESS. tcACCESS allows a SQL-based access to hierarchical DL/I structures. tcACCESS is already in production for more than 3 years. Nearly all "old" 3270-applications that access DL/I have been replaced by modern web-applications that access DL/I with SQL statements. The connector to DL/I is tcACCESS. himolla has developed a process that allows the development of new web-applications within minutes. All information relevant to the DL/I access and information relevant to the presentation of the data are stored in a central relational database. Based upon these information the web-application can be easily generated. (User story available at "High tech – in harmony with people and nature"). 

 

Mr. Friedhelm Buch from Marquard & Bahls, Hamburg, presented a migration project from VSE/VSAM to MS SQL Server. The heart of this project is the bi-directional synchronization in real-time of the production data between VSAM and MS SQL Server. Both platforms are of equal priority (Master/Master Replication). Changes applied to the VSAM files from Batch and CICS are captured in real-time by tcVISION and propagated to mirror MS SQL Server databases on a Windows platform. From here, triggers take the changes and apply them to the new application. Changes performed in the MS SQL Server environment are triggered and propagated back to the mainframe VSAM files using tcACCESS. Mr. Buch spoke highly about the following aspects of the B.O.S. solutions: Ease of use that allowed for a fast and timely implementation into production and the failsafe design of the products. (User story available at: "independent – sound - individual"). 

 

The third presentation was given by Mr. Christoph Welter, Welter Consulting. Mr. Welter discussed a very special and interesting implementation of tcACCESS and tcVISION: Data transfers in large networks across provider borders. Both products are used for intelligent and fully automated file transfers between a mainframe and Windows-, UNIX-servers. Christoph Welter praised the flexibility of tcVISION because of the REXX script language that comes with the product. This language provides total control of the production data transfers. Using the tcVISION Control board it is possible to actively monitor all servers that are part of the tcVISION Manager network (more than 50 servers). The presentation discussed an implementation in the Finance sector that has been developed to support a large number of file transfers (User story available at: "Independent, Innovative and Future oriented").

 

The attendees of the Symposium were impressed by the functions of the new versions of tcACCESS and tcVISION.

The new Capture Mechanisms of tcVISION Version 4 for DB2 LUW, ORACLE and MS SQL Server and application examples of the new Repository were discussed in detail. With reference to the presentation of Mr. Buch the new features of Version 5 were presented which include a full bi-directional synchronization performed solely by tcVISION.

The party spent the evening at the famous Münchner Hofbräuhaus and enjoyed the local, Bavarian culture.

All participant of the Symposium agreed that B.O.S. should continue to conduct regular User Symposiums in the future.

A special Thanks to all attendees and presenters from B.O.S.

         

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