Home » Information Builders Magazine Winter 1999 » New Mainframe FOCUS Releases Add Y2K Compliance Tools and Features

New Mainframe FOCUS Releases Add Y2K Compliance Tools and Features

Mainframe FOCUS Gets Year 2000 Auto-Conversion and Testing Tools

 

New FOCUS Release 7.0.8R for VM and MVS offers 17 new Year 2000 functions and utilities to assist users performing Y2K remediation on their own FOCUS reports and applications. The just-released mainframe FOCUS product includes a REBUILD facility for automatically converting old-style character and numeric dates into Y2K-ready Smart Dates, along with a TESTDATE facility for simulating system clock settings beyond the year 2000 for application testing.

 

FOCUS 7.0.8R also has six new Y2K-compliant date math functions for calculating business days between dates, manipulating Julian dates with full four-character years, converting date formats, and adding days, months, or years directly to existing date fields. Its enhanced Y2K date window and threshold facilities also support dynamically sliding windows, making FOCUS 7.0.8R ideal for financial applications such as mortgages, which require a year threshold that changes with each new year. Customers with active maintenance contracts can upgrade to this release without charge by calling Customer Support Services at (800) 736-6130.

 

Year 2000 Beat

A steady stream of Y2K-enhanced products, tools, and compliance services is expanding Information Builders' family. For up-to-the-minute information on Y2K-compliant products and service offerings, click here.

 

Century-Aware FOCUS

Y2K-capable FOCUS releases are available for MVS, VM, UNIX, and OpenVMS platforms, and they include Year 2000 compliance features, subroutines, patches, and bug fixes. Plus, Information Builders' new benchmark MVS product FOCUS 7.0.8R is now shipping with built-in new tools for converting and testing dates on IBM mainframe systems.

 

WALDO and WALDO 2.0

Y2K Analyzers for FOCUS

The WALDO (Where Are Likely Date Objects) Y2K Analyzer is available for MVS, VM, UNIX, and OpenVMS FOCUS users, to support fast, host-based Year 2000 impact analysis, remediation, and testing. Also, WALDO 2.0 is now shipping to MVS mainframe users; it offers an array of new reports, management tools, and features.

 

Take the Y2K Challenge!

Information Builders' Professional Services Division is offering FOCUS users a Y2K Challenge. FOCUS users can submit up to 10,000 lines of FOCUS code and see the power of WALDO for Year 2000 compliance! Call Robert Zerbe, Y2K Practice Manager, at (212) 736-4433, Ext. 3038.

 

PC FOCUS Y2K Upgrades

Year 2000-ready FOCUS Six 6.40 or FOCUS Desktop 7.02 for Windows 95 or NT are now available, with support for FOCUS Smart Dates and century thresholds to bring older PC FOCUS code into Y2K compliance. Special upgrade offers make it easy and cost-effective for users of PC FOCUS/Plus, FOCUS for Windows, and early versions of FOCUS Six to move up to these Y2K-ready desktop releases. Visit www.informationbuilders.com or call your Information Builders Representative for more information.