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 3^rd. 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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