Massive Illinois High School District To Move Back Office from IMS to SQL

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3/14/2007—To reduce IT costs and improve productivity, the Township High School District 211 in Illinois has migrated its student information, payroll, personnel and security database systems from a mainframe IMS environment to a Microsoft SQL Server platform.

The project is aggressive in its scale. Located roughly 25 miles northwest of Chicago, the Township High School District 211 is Illinois' largest high school district, serving 12,878 students in five high schools, as well as two alternative high schools with approximately 40 special needs students each.

"We've chosen to migrate these back-office functions, which are critical to our overall technology infrastructure, to a more agile platform like Windows to eliminate the significant costs associated with mainframe maintenance, while at the same time increasing our internal control over core applications," said district Director of Technology Services Charlie Peterson in a prepared statement.

The district will work with technology providers ATERAS and Fujitsu to move its applications off a mainframe and onto the Microsoft Windows platform. The solution uses ATERAS DB-Shuttle and Fujitsu's NetCOBOL for .NET, NeoBatch, and NeoKicks.

Because the migration involves all of the district's critical business processes, a key objective is to make it as transparent as possible to users who are in constant interaction with their business applications and interfaces.

To that end, ATERAS' technical expertise and automation technology will help ensure a quick and error-free conversion of the IMS calls, the database and data. The Fujitsu product suite will automate the migration of CICS, COBOL and JCL code. The DB-Shuttle and NetCOBOL technology will be used to create an open-architecture environment in order to provide seamless computing across the district's enterprise.

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About the author: David Kopf is a freelance technology writer and editor and can be reached at [email protected].

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About the Author

David Kopf is a freelance technology writer and marketing consultant, and can be reached at [email protected].

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