5915 Airport Road, Suite 625,
Mississauga, Ontario. L4V 1T1
( (905) 677-6666     ť (905) 677-6671   8   www.datadesign.com

May 2000

A Newsletter for Clients of Data Design Systems

Organizational Announcement

Dan Crook, CEO

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Dan Crook as Chief Executive Officer of Data Design Systems Inc. effective March 1, 2000. I will be assuming the position of Chairman, and will be focusing much of my time and energy on developing new business opportunities for the company. Dan joined Data Design Systems Inc. in September, 1996 as Director of Sales and Marketing with over twenty years of senior management experience in the computer industry. Prior to that, he was President of Novadyne Canada Inc. During his tenure with us, he has contributed greatly to our organization and management development, and has spearheaded numerous business process improvements.

Please feel free to contact either Dan or me if you have any questions regarding this organizational change.

George Comrie, P.Eng, CDP, CMC, Chairman

PrimeCode™ Garners Early Customer Acceptance

Customer response to initial shipments of PrimeCode™ has been very positive. Here are some comments from a long-time RMSWin user on PrimeCode™:

• ”I’m very happy with the way it looks and works.
• It has much more capability than RMSWin.
• I especially like being able to have multiple explorer windows open at the same time.
• With PrimeCode™, our developers and QA staff will no longer have to learn RMSCOM.”

A Career in Configuration Management ?

If you work as a configuration manager (no doubt the case for many Dispatch readers), you may be tempted to think that your organization doesn’t appreciate your contribution as much as that of, say, its application software developers. Especially so in the current overheated market in which software specialists with internet-related skills and experience (e.g., Java  and   object-oriented programming) seem to be able to write their own tickets. Well, take heart — the situation is changing, albeit slowly.

There are signs that configuration management (CM) is coming into its own as a discipline within information technology:

• Many large organizations have created and staffed a corporate CM group with responsibility for CM processes and tools on all platforms and applications.
• Standards, particularly for CM methodology and processes, are emerging. An Institute of Configuration Management (ICM) headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona has been formed which offers training and certification in the discipline.
• For several years now, the British Computer Society has had a Configuration Management Specialist Group dedicated to the special interests of its members working in CM and the advancement of their careers.
• One source estimates the CM tools market to be worth $2 billion U.S. annually, and growing at a rate of 40% per year (heartening news to tools vendors like us).

So what is the role of the configuration manager, and why is it so important to the organization?

• CM provides life-cycle process support for development, testing, and turnover to production. In most organizations, the days of patching or replacing live applications with code which has not been managed consistently throughout its life are gone!
• CM mitigates the risks to business continuity associated with the introduction of planned changes to applications and network configurations. (That’s a fancy way of saying CM helps IT to avoid “shooting itself in the foot”!)

• CM tools and process support enhance development productivity by relieving developers of the tedious task of choosing appropriate versions of configuration entities when building and testing their code.  
• CM is the custodian and protector of the organization’s software assets, which in most organizations are becoming increasingly more important as the organization’s dependence on its systems increases year by year.

I hope these points will give you some added ammunition next time you sit down with your manager to discuss your performance and career path. And one final note ... be prepared to invest in upgrading your CM process and tools skills. As this segment of the industry evolves, it will demand increasing levels of technical knowledge and demonstrable professional qualification.

PrimeCode™ Code Editor Interface (CEI) Available

PrimeCode™ CEI is available as of April 30, 2000. It provides an interface to CodeWright^® developers’ workbench tools. Developers can now access the PrimeCode™ software repository directly from their tools, saving time and providing all the benefits of using PrimeCode™, right at development time. Call your account representative for more information.

PrimeCode™ Planned Product Releases

PrimeCode™ consists of the:

• Client - GUI interface
• Core Servers (RMS)
• Feature Servers (APPLY)

For our customers who have not upgraded to PrimeCode™, the version number to rely on is the Core (RMS) number. The PrimeCode™ version will cover all the components.

Recognizing that it is not an easy task for our customers to upgrade to the most current version, we are committed to support less recent versions of PrimeCode™ or of the Core and Feature servers. The functionality introduced in PrimeCode™ 3.1.1, compared to that of 3.05 and the improved usability of the GUI interface suggest that, whenever possible, our customers should consider upgrading to this version. Please refer to our website for the 3.1.1 release notes.

Jerome Boyer
Director, Product Development

From the IRUG Chairperson

Hello again…from your IRUG Chairperson. It’s that time of year again. I believe you should have all received an IRUG invitation through e-mail or fax by now. Amy Hughes and I have began actively planning the agenda for the spring IRUG conference. In order to plan the conference around what the users want, we would like your input on a few items.

We need volunteers to do user presentations. From the response of the Fall conference, it appears you are interested in how we all use RMS/PrimeCode™ and how we solved some of our unique issues using RMS/PrimeCode™. In the past, this area has usually been the most difficult to fill. We’d welcome your participation!

I mailed everyone last month regarding a Technical presentation from DDS and only received one response. I have added one myself. The more ideas and responses we have, the better we can cater this conference to suit your current needs.

Topic 1:Duplicate DDLs - How to manage them using RMS. I would also like duplicate file names addressed here.

Topic 2:Approval Process using PrimeCode™ - How it works, unique issues, etc.

Please let us now which of these topics you would like to see or let us know if there are any other issues you would like addressed. Hopefully we will have enough material for the Spring conference to make it a two day affair. We have currently confirmed for one day, Friday, June 9, 2000. We were fairly crammed for time in the Fall and I hope that we have the same problem and response for the Spring conference.

We did a question and answer period by just starting with an issue that I was experiencing here at eFunds.  Would you like to see this included in the Spring conference as well? We will need a volunteer for this also. We are also going to discuss what to do with the IRUG board, which currently consists of me. My term will be up in June.

To submit your responses, questions or suggestions for the upcoming Spring IRUG conference, contact me at:

( (414) 341-5008
8 david_mcfarlin@efunds.com
irug@datadesign.com

David A. McFarlin, IRUG Chair

Spring 2000 IRUG Conference

We invite you to join us on Friday, June 9, 2000 from 8 am to 5:45 pm at the Toronto Marriott Eaton Centre in Downtown Toronto. There will be continuing education sessions, PrimeCode™ user presentations, product updates, a customer forum, IRUG business and much more! The Marriott is holding a block of guest rooms for IRUG attendees at $199.00 per night. Please contact our Sales and Marketing department to arrange for housing and IRUG registration.

( (905) 677-6666 Extension 0 or 247
8 sales@datadesign.com

Please join us Friday night for an evening at the
SkyDome, sponsored by Data Design Systems,
where we’ll watch the Blue Jays take on the
Montreal Expos!

RMS Update

The latest release of RMS is D00.12, available April 30, 2000. It includes five minor bugfixes and can be downloaded from our website at  http://www.datadesign.com/support/customer/ and click Download.

New On-line Discussion Forum

Check out our new discussion forum at: http://www.datadesign.com/support/customer/ and click on Discussion, then Discussion Forum.

Hints and Tips

... DDS Client Support and Services Team

Managing C Code - Which Language?

Some of our customers who manage C code are confused as to the language to use. Should the components be language C or C-ANSI? Below are some guidelines that might help:

• The  C-ANSI language parser does not parse references that are in the <stdio.h> format. It only parses references that are in the “stdio.h” format. For the main source component, C-ANSI should be used if the referenced components are system header files <stdio.h> (existing under the C compiler in the \TANDEM group). In this case, those system header files won’t be parsed and won’t be added as references because those files are portable and are the same on all systems. So instead of parsing them and adding them as a reference, they will be added as a dependency if they were used by the C compiler during a compile.
• The C language parser parses the references that are in the <mydir.h> format. C should be used on the main source component if the components it references are user-specific header files and not system header files because those headers are not portable.   
• If you are using a mix of system header files and user-specific header files, then the C-ANSI language can be used. The system header files should be in the <stdio.h> format and the user specific should be in the “myhdr.h” format.

RMS Course Dates for 2000 / 2001

• May 1-4
• August 14-17
• November 6-9
• February 5-8 (2001)

PrimeCode™ Course Dates for 2000 / 2001

• June 12 - 14
• September 25 - 27
• December 18 - 20
• March 19-21 (2001)

Around DDS

Daniel Herceg joined us in March as a Programmer Analyst on our Product Development Team. Dan brings a number of years of experience working in the Non-Stop environment, and with RMS at some of our customer sites.

Bruce Korb resigned from Data Design Systems in December to join SCO in Santa Cruz, California. Bruce was a valued long-time member of our Product Development Team.

Amy Hughes, our Sales and Marketing Coordinator, joined Algorithmics as Product Marketing Coordinator in April. Amy was instrumental in improving our marketing efforts.

George Comrie, P.Eng., has been elected to the Governing Council of the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario, which licenses professional engineers and regulates the practice of engineering in Ontario in the public interest. Congratulations, George.

Please join us in wishing Dan, Bruce and Amy all the best in their future endeavours.

Current Product Versions as of May 2000