SaskTel

In a multi-million dollar project which has proven to be one of their most exciting challenges yet, Sapphire International Inc was contracted to convert 65 of SaskTel's core business applications to DataEase for Windows. In order to fulfil the scale and logistics of this project Sapphire called upon Ru-Soft Ltd. Ru-Soft's experience in Russian based offshore development enabled Sapphire International Inc to have its own dedicated team of IT specialists selected and recruited specifically for this project. A team of 4 managers, 2 team leaders and 20 dedicated developers delivered a solution representing 1000s of man days in just 18 months.

The Company
Saskatchewan Telecommunications (SaskTel) is a Canadian corporation providing first-rate telecommunications to the people of Saskatchewan, a service they have been delivering for more than 90 years. The SaskTel serving area links 13 cities with 566 smaller communities and their surrounding rural areas, including 49,000 farms - all told, more than 454,000 business and residential customers. SaskTel's work force of approximately 4000 employees live and work in more than 50 communities throughout Saskatchewan, delivering the best communications products and services to every corner of the province.

Challenge
With many organisations' IT departments moving towards a standard suite of software applications, a corporate policy was introduced by SaskTel in the second half of 2000 to move 3,500 PC's to Windows 2000, both on a client and server level, from their previous Windows 95 and Novell setup.

This decision consequently had implications for most of their software applications but in particular SaskTel's existing DataEase DOS 4.53 and 5.x applications.

Having developed around 1,500 DataEase DOS applications over many years by different departments, SaskTel's W2K Group was faced with the huge task of analysing, categorising and rationalising these to keep only the applications which would be essential to their business needs.

A total of 65 applications were allocated to Category A which meant it was essential that they were converted to a Windows system.

To maintain consistency with Microsoft's suite of products SaskTel first considered having these DOS applications moved to Access, an option which was quickly discarded in favour of staying with DataEase. Moving to Access would have involved a total rewrite instead of the more cost-effective and practical conversion to DataEase where most of their business logic would be retained together with the familiarity and ease of use to which their users were accustomed, resulting in a much shorter conversion time (up to 5 times less than moving to Access!).

In what represented SaskTel's second biggest IT project in its history, Sapphire International Inc. was commissioned to proceed with the conversion after a pilot analysis of 5 applications. Mike Harrick, an independent project manager in Regina, Saskatchewan, acted as the interface between both companies, and quickly became instrumental to the running of the conversion project.

Solution
The general brief was for a "One to One Conversion", Sapphire's term to describe the porting of a DataEase DOS application to DataEase for Windows without the addition of new functionality and where the end result resembles the structure and functionality of the original system.

Andy Rose, Sapphire's Project Manager responsible for SaskTel's conversion work, explains the complexities involved in this project: "The scope of the applications presented for conversion covered a variety of sectors within SaskTel, such as Financial departments, Customer Services, Technologies and Development, and Engineering. One application in particular, TELMART, a Point of Sale application, was deployed in 11 different sites with 11 variations.

The applications varied enormously in the number of users, from 1 or 2 users for one application to 150 users for another. They were also quite disparate in complexity and design as they were developed by independent departments.

Andy Rose continues: "The logistics involved in converting what would mean thousands of man days work represented an exciting challenge for Sapphire and as a result we called upon Ru-Soft to expand our conversion team to dedicate 20 developers specifically to this project."

At SaskTel, Mike Larson, a DataEase expert working for the Finance department, played a key role in the user acceptance cycle of the converted applications and signing them off when satisfied. He comments, "We soon developed an efficient working relationship ensuring the delivered applications met our users' requirements."

By December 2001 Sapphire had rolled out a number of applications and by December of the following year the majority of the applications had been completed even though Windows 2000 rolled out to XP in the middle of the project.

A number of Sapphire's senior developers/trainers visited SaskTel's offices to provide on site training on a regular basis.

Outcome
Ru-Soft was in a position to quickly supply considerable technical resource an set this up in it's offices in St Petersburg, Russia. This enabled Sapphire to utilise it's project management skills on keeping the project on time and on budget.

In addition, with relevant technical resource in the UK relatively scarce and hence high cost, Ru-Soft gave Sapphire the means to deliver a high quality project with much lower costs than would have been associated with a similar development completed purely in the West.