Year 2000 Focus Group

In the unavoidable absence of Edwin Woodcock, who has recently succeeded to the chair of this Group. John Evans kindly volunteered to take the chair on this occasion. He had to formally yield the chair during the summer. The meeting warmly thanked him for leadingthe group so well since its inception in 1996.

Progress on AA's Year 2000 projects : Chris Bewick

The Group was pleased to have what seems to have become a full annual report from Chris Bewick. Good progress is being made at the AA assisted by use of a dedicated mainframe service for real-time testing. This is achieved by partitioning off a node. It took a week to build the service using their development mainframe filestore securities and catalogue copy. The task was undoubtedly made easier through the use of Primer-X software under special licence from Guardian. Carol Lewis observed that EDS (Social Security) had used Export/Import to set up their service and this had taken much longer.

Chris reported that BACS are now ready to engage in tests with users and have published a User Guide for this purpose. CARDNET, for handling credit card transactions, do not appear ready yet and have not issued any Guidance so far.

Contingency planning has started and thought is being given to ensure staff will be available as required at the vital times.

Year 2000 Business Contingency: Janet Pavelin

This presentation revealed some of ICL's thinking about Contingency Planning and generated some useful discussion. ICL's own plans are clearly being developed and there is nothing firm to report at the moment. There are a number of issues, eg continuity of power generation and supply, for which we do not have information at present. It is hoped that Action 2000 will deliver their promise of a report by the end of this year on the state of readiness of all public utilities.

The discussion brought out concerns about staffing. Even if suitably attractive packages are put in place, will staff actually be there on the day? They may consider dealing with domestic problems to be a greater priority. Will they be able to get to work - even to get into the building? What level of support will ICL be able to offer at the time? Is it possible to indemnify a service not meeting its SLA because of extraneous difficulties?

What are businesses doing about development work? It would be a good idea to maintain a stable service for 3 months either side of the date change. Some members reported that development work will be on hold next year with a fix on fail approach to non-Year 2000 problems.

ICL Update : Peter Iles

Issue 17 of Technical Bulletin 23 was distributed at the meeting.

Peter provided a brief recap on items from ICL Year 2000 presentations at the AXiS Conference at Keele in September. Of particular interest is the Date2Date product, also described to this Group at our July meeting. It provides a virtual date facility for a UNIX environment comparable to the facility on VME. It addresses problems of date in data and offers one way to age data for testing purposes. The other two ways are by accelerated processing of a sub-set of a database; or by editing the date fields in a database. The latter approach, as with Date2Date, assumes that you know exactly where date fields exist.

Progress Reports

Eight members provided progress reports which will be reported more fully in the minutes of the meeting distributed to active members of the Focus Group. The general message is that progress with testing mainframe systems is going well and there seems to be an air of confidence that compliance targets will be met. But there are growing concernes about UNIX systems and to some extent PC systems. One member reported buying some new Dell PCs which were assumed to be compliant but tests proved otherwise! A message for members is to continue to check systems.

Focus Group Activity in 1999

Do members see a need to continue these meetings throughout 1999? Should we look at the Euro? There seemed to be more support for a closer look at UNIX systems. If a meeting was scheduled for the Spring it would be a good time to check progress with external suppliers

Next meeting

Planned to be held in London towards the end of March 1999 and is expected to focus on UNIX systems and latest feedback from key product suppliers.

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