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Toronto Police Service
Toronto Police Service CASC
System Goes Live – World First for British Migrations Company
Following an eight month migration project conducted by
MSS International, the Toronto Police Service Courts Scheduling system,
CASC, went live on May 3rd. This included the first use of
the MSS COBOL to Java migration software and the first time ever that
an automated conversion has produced a one for one COBOL to Java
conversion. After a week of operation in the new environment the
cut-over was pronounced a 'smooth transition' by Katie Escudero of the
Toronto Police IT Services department.
Toronto Police Service is one of the largest municipal
police forces in North America, serving the City of Toronto. Toronto,
the largest city in Canada, has a population of more than 2.5 million
residents, and serves as Canada’s economic capital.
The
CASC system is a critical legacy system that ran on a Unisys
mainframe. CASC is used by
Toronto Courts, City of Toronto and TPS to schedule and manage police
officers’ court attendance.
First implemented in 1986 using Unisys LINC and COBOL, CASC was
a prime candidate for a technology refresh in 2007. Citing a decrease
in available technical expertise in the legacy system, high operating
cost and a need for increased flexibility, TPS requested proposals to
migrate CASC to a modern platform.
MSS
won the bid with an offer of a fully automated migration from LINC and
COBOL to Java (J2EE), XML and DB2. Before being finally awarded the
contract, MSS delivered a proof of concept and reference checks endorsed
MSS’ extensive experience in migrations and reputation
for delivering complex migrations on time and to budget.
Using
the well-proven migrate!LINC product and the newer migrate!COBOL (Java)
technology, the migration was accomplished in 3 months and, after
extensive testing, went live at the beginning of May 2008.
The
cut-over to the new systems was achieved with minimum impact on the up
to 6000 online users (80 concurrent users on average. This is a
significant achievement considering the changes involved: Linc migrated
to Java, Cobol migrated to Java, WFL to shell script, scheduling system
to crontab, DMSII database to DB2, COMS replaced by Websphere and the
underlying MCP platform replaced with a standard AIX (IBM p Series)
system.
Nick Wnekowski CTO at MSS says “Not only are the end-users
benefitting from a web browser interface and the operations department
having a standard environment to manage, but the developers also have a
better environment to work in. A
range of development technologies are now available that will
significantly extend the life of the CASC system as well as bringing all
the advantages and flexibility of programming in Java. The transition for developers was
also eased by the layout of the new code being as close as possible to
the original - even in the case of the automated COBOL to Java
conversion where a virtual 1:1 ratio of new to old code lines was
achieved!”.
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