UNC-CH Information Technology Services

New version of WebFocus no simple upgrade

WebFocus is a report-generating system that serves almost 1,500 developers and other users at UNC-Chapel Hill. The largest user groups include Human Resources, Student Administration and Finance. Over the past 18 months, WebFocus was upgraded to the latest version in what became an enormous undertaking by the three-member Enterprise Reporting team within Enterprise Data Management — Kathryn Dempsey, Dan O’Neal and Michael Young.

“What took so long was that the infrastructure was very old — not only was server software old, but also the machine it was running on was old,” said Michael Young, manager of Enterprise Reporting. “We had to get all new equipment, and completely reinstall and reconfigure the software. That’s a step you don’t usually do when you’re upgrading.”

The software upgrade was necessary for two reasons. First, the old version of WebFocus was no longer supported by the vendor. Second, the newer versions of Oracle database software being installed on servers across campus were not compatible with the old version of WebFocus.

“WebFocus pulls data from all over campus, including 20 or 30 Oracle repositories and one mainframe,” said Young. “So we had no choice but to upgrade the software. On top of that, the new version of WebFocus wouldn’t run on the old hardware, so we had to upgrade the hardware as well. That was step one — we built a new house. Step two was moving all our stuff into the new house.”

One of the benefits of WebFocus is that it lets users create their own reports without relying on ITS to do it for them. More often than not, these reports are saved so they can be rerun at regular intervals.

“Users can schedule reports to run at whatever time they select,” said Dan O’Neal, application specialist. “The report can be e-mailed, printed or distributed in a burst to a large group where each component of the report is sent to a specific department manager. It’s very useful and people become accustomed to generating and receiving these reports regularly. Rather than make users recreate reports on the new system, we wanted to move the old reports to the new system.”

But the second step of migrating data from the old system to the new system proved even more difficult than the first step of installing new hardware and software.

“We literally had thousands of reports written by thousands of users since 1991,” said Young. “The clutter was all over the place. So instead of moving the mess from one house to another we decided to clean up the mess first.”

This was a huge effort. In addition to cleaning up the large number of reports, the group also had to examine close to 75 different applications that relied on WebFocus-generated reports. Each procedure in the applications had to be tested and edited to clean up syntax so that it would be compatible with the new system.

“There were a number of applications using the old server that we weren’t aware of,” said Young. “The only way we could identify them was to turn the server off and wait until the phone rang.

“In the middle of all this we were trying to release a new tool for the WebFocus developers on campus, and the three of us were feeling a bit overwhelmed,” Young continued. “It was like being in a leaky boat and trying to paddle to shore, but you can’t paddle because you have to bail water out, and if you stop bailing long enough to paddle your boat fills up and sinks.”

After many weeks of stopping and restarting the old server, the group identified all the applications that relied on the old system, and the server was officially decommissioned in late July.

Everything about the current WebFocus system is new: a new server with new software is accessing the latest Oracle 10g databases; the operating system changed from MVS to Unix; reports formerly submitted using CGI are processed via Java servlets; and new user training classes are planned for 3rd quarter.

“We decided if we were going to do it, we were going to do it right,” said Young. “It took a long time, but now we’re seeing the benefits. And we’ve finally stopped bailing water.”