Charmer Sunbelt Group of Baltimore, Maryland, one of the largest liquor distributors in the United States, recently contacted Potomac Systems for a migration project to convert seven of their host based LINC systems to workstation development and the latest EAE suite of products.  The Charmer Sunbelt Group is a distributor conglomerate with each company using their own LINC application.  The applications vary considerably due to the nature of the products the company sells and various state liquor laws that control how they do business.  With this in mind, Potomac knew that each application would be unique and each migration would have to be handled individually. 

First, Potomac installed the EAE servers as well as a Version Control server to support CSG’s extensive development staff.  CSG would also require remote access capabilities for many of their developers that were telecommuters.  Next, Potomac ensured that the LAN and WAN performance upgrades as well as Terminal Services installations were in place prior to deployment to avoid any issues with the development environment bandwidth and performance.  Lastly, Potomac also did all of the data migration that was required due to reserved word conflicts. 

CSG also wanted to “test the waters” regarding an EAE Windows 2000 deployment with a pilot project.  This data conversion from DMS II to MSSQL tested our mettle a bit due to the usage of component arrays.  Another big consideration that came to light was the 400 plus Work Flow Language scripts that support the operational activities of their business on their previous MCP mainframe host.  Potomac undertook the task of rewriting a bulk of the WFLs in VB Script so that the Windows deployment could be tested for conversion validation!  While we had the patient open we were also tasked with dressing up of some of their screens and implementing Component Enabler and ASP pages for access from their intranet.  This project called upon a wide variety of Potomac ’s staff expertise and demonstrated its range of technical abilities once again. 

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