Transitioning to Stonebranch: 11 Ways to Prepare for the Migration to a New WLA Solution

Hi, everybody. Welcome or welcome back. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to our global audience today, and thank you for joining us for another session of Stonebridge Online. My name is Marissa Walker, and in case this is your first time, I am a marketing manager for StoneBranch, and I will be your moderator today. As always, it's my pleasure to introduce our speakers for today, Joe Carbonella, Director of Professional Services, and Mike Archambault, who is an engineer for StoneBranch. So with that, I will hand things over to you, Joe. Thank you, Marissa. My name is Joe Carbonella. I'm director of professional services at StoneBranch. Today, we will be looking at transitioning to StoneBranch, the migration process from your legacy system to StoneBranch. I will start off talking about a few aspects of how we can go about doing these transitions, our best practices, our methodology, and a bit on planning. And I'll spend probably about twenty minutes on all of that. And then I'll pass over to Mike Auchenbo, who's going to do a live demonstration of some of our conversion tools. So a quick introduction of those of us who are part of the presentation. Just a very little bit on software and then on professional services team. Again, my name is Joe Carbonella. I'm relatively new to Stonebranch and to workload automation in general, just coming up on a year. Mike Auchinbo, who will be doing the demonstration, on the other hand is with Stone Branch for a few years more than that. And he's got a good couple of decades of workload automation experience under his belt. We're also joined today by Blue Cross Blue Shield, who've graciously agreed to be part of the presentation and to be on hand to answer any questions that you may have for an actual client. So just to set the stage a little bit, StoneBranch offers a suite of products that we collectively term Universal Automation Center. Our focus today in terms of transitioning, converting from another platform to Stone Branch will be on Universal Controller, which sometimes we refer to as UC, Universal Automation Center, UAC. So a quick bit on professional services and what we do. In addition to being able to help with conversion services, transition services, We also do a lot of work with integrations as a whole set of tools that we can use to integrate the Stonebranch tool set into your own IT ecosystem. General consulting services as well related to the product. We can do optimization, health checks, upgrades, anything that you might need help with. And in addition to the consulting services, we also have a global product support team Between us, between our North American team and our European team, we have presence across a large part of the globe. Global support team works in most was able to service most time zones, and get some good marks. And I also wanted to point out that as far as what you get with our support, when you have maintenance support with Stone Branch, there's a lot of additional information, a lot of tools that come with that beyond the support service, which is already a great service in and of itself. We get very good marks for our documentation. We have good educational materials as part of our support portal. And I didn't mention training. We also have a full suite of training courses. We can do that both in a formal setting with instructor led courses. We also have a few elearning options that we're expanding over the course of this year as well. So first, let's take a look at basic options for how you approach the transition. You're looking to migrate to Stone Ranch, how do you go about it? How do you take it on? At a very high level, there's two general options. One, you can try and do it yourself, a DIY operation, or you can have Stone Branch assist you. So for DIY, firstly, it's a largely manual process. You'll interact with our universal controller, the UC that I mentioned earlier. It's a web based GUI that allows you to do everything you need to do to create jobs, to manage them, formative administration, reporting, etc. So the DIY approach, as I say, is largely manual, you'll go into universal controller and literally create each and every job, create dependencies, put together your schedules, all through UC. It's a great way to learn the product, for sure to sometimes when you speak in terms of owning the data, you might call it a trial by fire, but it's a good solution for smaller projects, something on the order of say hundreds of tasks or jobs to be converted. And as I mentioned before, we do offer a lot of good educational materials to help you to manage that on your own. In terms of having StoneBranch support you, there's a number of options there. We can tailor a program to your budget, to your needs. So at the most basic level, mentioned training quickly, we can provide training to help you get up to speed on the products. As a next step up, do something called a jumpstart, where along with training typically there'll be some number of days of consulting to use in an ad hoc basis. Essentially, we can assist you wherever makes sense for you. So possibly configuring your environments, getting the first couple of environments up and running, and then assisting you with the actual conversion process as required. And as a of a top level option, we can provide what we term a turnkey solution, where we pretty much do the whole conversion process in conjunction with your team. So although it's called turnkey, we have to combine our resources for that. We do conversion bits, the development bits, we assist with getting the infrastructure up and running. Typically, we provide training as well. And then we work with your own resources to provide the validation, essentially the user acceptance testing and sign off to ultimately get it into production. So we'll talk now about our methodology, our best practices for conducting a transition. I should say that the slides in particular are built largely with the turnkey solution in mind. However, the concepts here in what's a seven step process are pertinent to any migration from DIY all the way up to a turnkey process. So as I say, it's a seven step process. We'll dive into each one and examine them in a bit of detail. So step one, starting with analysis. Now, the analysis step can actually and typically does actually start before we even have a project to talk about. It's often part of the presale step in which we're looking to get an idea of how big of a project we're talking about. We'll try to have a look at your data in some detail. We'll look at it in terms of not only the numbers of tasks that need to be converted, but also complexities, what kind of dependencies there are, anything special going on with schedules. We'll look to see to determine whether it makes sense to do any pre processing, which is to say that we might want to process your data, your exported data before we put it through our actual conversion tools. And yeah, the outputs of the analysis phase in large part are an assessment of how much it's going to take to complete a successful transition. So time estimate, resource estimate, and also high level design decisions around how we're going to accomplish that. Initiation and setup is where the project really begins. So the one of the biggest, most important outputs of this step is the organizational readiness. Basically, we're looking to set things up for a successful project. So we typically start things off with set of kickoff meetings where we invite basically everybody and anybody who's going to be part of the project, all the stakeholders effectively, anyone who's interested in our products from your organization. And we kick things off with an introduction to StoneBranch, a quick demo of stone branch suite of products. And we also have breakout sessions to talk in detail about the some of the finer points such as architectural considerations, security, There might be some design sessions. We'll also look to help get you up and running at first, at least the first couple of your environments such as dev and UAT, possibly all of them. So kind of start to get everybody lined up for what their responsibilities are going to be over the course of the project and roughly when they'll be required. And also a big output from this step is a project plan. We'll work with your project management team to to figure out and agree timing, milestones, and so on. The workflow transition is the actual conversion step. So this, by and large, is the most time intensive step in the process. Again, in a turnkey situation, Stonebranch will take the data away at this point. We run it through our conversion process, which entails some automated tools and some manual effort. Now, Mike is going to give you a bit of a deep dive into what that process looks like later on. But we do have tools that automate the process, do a lot of the heavy lifting and save a lot of time. We'll look at that a little bit later as well. Rough idea of how long these things take. But the end result of this phase or of this step is that we will take the converted data and deploy it into your dev environment. So at that stage, your Stonebranch development environment will contain fully converted data ready for validation and testing and tweaking. Training, the reason training is where it is in this sequence, step four, is we try to coordinate training with the data, right? So around the time that we're depositing your converted data into the stone branch development environment, If we can be conducting courses around them, then we have live examples of data that's familiar to you in your environment for you to work with, whatever to practice or to actually begin the work of validation, maybe creating your own jobs. So obviously the main output here is that your team is skilled up as appropriate. Certainly that entails not just that includes not only developers, but also operators, administrators. You can even get certified. We do have a certification program, which is typically partners, but depending on how much you want to know from our training program, you can go all the way through to certification. Validation, this is where you're going to do your systems integration testing, your user acceptance testing. We can help you through this. We have plenty of recommendations and tools that you can use to establish that the converted data works as it's meant to work. Big areas of testing here have to do with connectivity and security issues, user accounts that can or can't run-in certain environments, that kind of thing. How long this lasts is largely up to you as an organization and what kind of a test plan you've put in motion, which we again, we can help you with. But the output at the end of this, we should have a production ready set of data that we can deploy. And this is essentially your time to sign off on the converted data. Go live and cutover is exactly what it sounds like. We will move the data into production. Typically, there's another level of systems integration testing specifically or particularly around security issues, that kind of thing. And once we're ready, we'll cut over, sunset your legacy system or at least select the jobs from the legacy system and turn them on in Stonebranch. At the end of this stage, all or at least part of your data is in production in the Stonebranch environment. Now, bring up this again to highlight steps five and six. So oftentimes for very large projects where there are tens of thousands of tasks to be converted, we'll look to segment that to break it up into a multiphase approach. And that centers around steps five and six. So we'll look to do the entire conversion in step three, or convert the entire data set in one go. And that has a lot to do with the way that the automated tools work. For example, lots of universal IDs are created and linked to dependent tasks, dependent objects. So we look to do that once and then validation and cutover we can break down into chunks depending on how much data is involved, depending on what the timeline looks like. So anywhere from two to as many phases as are appropriate. The last step is post project, actually. So we go live and we'll come back at some point later on six months, a year, whatever makes sense, to have a look at how things are going to see if there's anything that can be optimized. An important point here as well, in terms of design, typically during the conversion process, we're looking to convert on a one to one basis. You know, it can be there may be something that we'd like to improve. And sometimes we do make improvements along the way. But we don't really want too many moving parts. We're looking to make sure that at the end of the transition process, you've got a fully functional set of data that's working as required. And then we can come back later and look to see if we can do any refactoring to improve the way the processes work, improve performance, etc. So lastly, for my bit, just a bit on planning. The length of the project can vary considerably anywhere from a couple of months to as long as a year. There are lots of variables that go into that. Obviously, the number of tasks that require conversion, the complexity, your own timelines, how you need to deploy jobs or sets of jobs. But at a very high level, This particular example is looking at, I think, this came from a job where we had about ten thousand tasks to convert. So as you can see, the workload transition step is probably the longest. Certainly in terms of man hours, it's the most time intensive. In this particular case, that was about ten weeks, think, eight to ten weeks. You can see that training is coordinated with the end of the workload transition phase so that as we're deploying data into your environments, we're doing the training. We illustrate just a couple of cycles of the steps five and six, the workload validation and then the cutover and go live. So here's phase one and this is phase two. And you'll note that the optimization phase is not actually part of this particular timeline that occurs at a later date. So a big question that, of course, is part of all this is how long this stuff takes. When you've got one thousand or ten thousand or fifty thousand jobs to convert, How much time goes into that? So based on experience, it varies, can vary greatly based on a number of things. Again, like we're talking about earlier, including the complexity of the jobs, how many dependencies there are. But in terms of raw numbers, a really rough metric. When we're looking at this from a manual perspective, and by the time you include everything that goes into this, including learning the Stone Branch product, working through issues, establishing schedules and triggers and everything else that needs to go into reproducing the functionality that you have currently with the legacy system, you're typically looking at accomplishing something like twelve to fifteen tasks per person day. So you've got a person working on this in earnest on average, at the end of it all, talking about something like twelve to fifteen tasks per day. Now, I've got a table down here that just plugs some numbers in. Apologies for the European comma there. But so for one thousand tasks, you know, you're looking at something on the order of between sixty and eighty man days or person days just for the conversion piece, right? This is this is just the workload transition component. So that's a good chunk of time. Now, you compare that with the automated or part automated process, when we do a turnkey solution, again, the numbers can vary greatly, but we're looking at something more like between one hundred and twenty five and two hundred jobs per day on average. So pretty much a tenfold increase or more, which drastically cuts down the amount of time that's required. So going back to what we were saying earlier, a manual approach is great for learning the product, for owning the data. And certainly if you've got the time and the resource to do it, it's a good approach. But if time is of the essence, then you probably want to look at automating the process and letting us help you with it. So selection of job sizes here. This is the number of tasks in the left column. So as you can see with a much larger number, twenty five thousand tasks to be converted, we're suddenly looking at some very large figures in terms of trying to do it manually. So this is two thousand person days, which is something like ten person years to do it manually as opposed to roughly one tenth or less than that if we can automate a lot of that. So that's my bit. Before I pass it over to Mike for demonstration of our conversion tools, I just wanted to see if there were any questions. So if anyone has any questions at this point, feel free to submit them. Hey, Mike, Mike is here in the meantime. Any questions for us so far? We'll give them some time to type things. I know it takes time to type your question if you have one. Here we go. So Joao asks, conversion tool is charged separately? You want to take that or you want me to go? Yeah, that's fine. So yes, in a word, yes. It's not so much the tool as the work that goes into it. The tool is not necessarily a shrink-wrap product that's ready to go. Really varies based on the source data and particulars of the conversion. So generally speaking, it's for use by Stone Branch or with an awful lot of support from Stone Branch. Thank you, Joe. Next question from Can you provide examples of task conversion inputs, high level tech specs of tasks converted in that project involving ten thousand tasks converted? If I hear the question right, Mike is going to do a bit of a deep dive into a conversion example. So hopefully that will answer some of those questions and see what it looks like. Perfect. Yeah, I think that'll probably answer some questions. And I did want to mention before I read the next question that we do have some guest question, Q and A speakers that we will we will have with us at the end of the session. So make sure everyone sticks around. Next question comes from Freddie. Hi, is there usually a schema of three environments dev, val and prod? Sorry, there is usually a schema of three environments, dev, val, and prod. Are those three different environments available in UAC? How would you transfer a workflow process from dev to val and then to prod? Okay, I think the answer is yes. I'm not sure how it was asked, but yes, we support multiple environments. Minimally, there's usually a dev environment, UAT and then a production environment. And we have a built in process for promoting changes between those environments in an automated way with links and IDs so that there's essentially no manual intervention. You make your changes in the lower environments, and then you step them through testing processes and promote them up into the higher environments as you go. Full bundle and promote. Yes, bundle and promote. And we do have a video on our website, I believe, talking about that feature. So Ron says I would love to see a large z os JCL being converted into a workflow plus tasks How I hope it's in the demo. Yeah. That's why Mike's smiling. Yeah. I mean, it's we're we'll talk we'll talk about it next. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take some CA seven data that we're going to convert over, and you'll see how that we can convert all the CA-seven processes just through one tool. Perfect. Any last questions? I think maybe we'll take one or two more, and then we'll hand things over to Mike. So everybody should see my demo right now as far as the I just have a directory up there with some files in it and then a background tool. Is that what everybody sees? Joe, is Okay. Alright. So basically, what I'm gonna do now is I wanna go kinda go through the process and what we do. What we'll do is we'll ask for you to transmit a file to us and we'll put it into a secure gateway. Once we have that that file and it's in that secure gateway, we're then gonna take the file and then run it through our conversion tool, conversion process. They can be cron files. They can be CSV files. I mean, if you want to create a CSV file and, you know, give us that information through a CSV, we could do we could convert that as well. In this instance, we're gonna have some c a seven files that we're gonna show. And and as you see in the c a seven files, what they're gonna be is really all it is is if you're familiar with c a seven, it's an old job command. Right here, we're looking at any job that begins with p nine and we're doing a list all so I can get all the information, including the DSN information and everything else. So that way I've got everything that's coming into my environment. And what I'll do at that point is then take this file and then run it into our conversion tool. The conversion tool that we use one of the conversion tools, I should say, that we use is called XCT, the express conversion tool. What we'll do is we'll do come up to this tool. And as you can see, you can do not only you can do cron. I can do Windows. I can do TWS. Typically, I can do JCL. I can also do a UC four if I wanted to. And then I'll I can do whatever the CH scenarios are, in this tool. So for instance, I'm looking at CH seven files or auto search or sk CS Scheduler, any of those set set of files. And as you go down the route, down here, I got a CSV file as well, or I can also do open up some SAP files if I wanted to. Control M, JobTrack, AS400, Beta forty two. So you can see the the tool itself is a very it's very vast. It can actually do quite a quite a bit of a conversion process. And what we use this tool for is really our main conversion process. And we'll go out there and identify the different products that we can convert from. And after talking with you, you discussed, you know, what is it that's how you wanna do that? So let me cancel out of this. And for instance, the file options section allows me to identify, do I wanna have create clusters for all my different agents? And how we would do that is by creating variables off of that. Do I wanna allow duplicate task names? Well, the controller doesn't really allow the duplicate task names internally, so we don't we never allow that internally with ourselves. The with the as far as how I wanna create my workflows. And we have the ability in our workflow creation to say, I can draw a straight line between two things or I can have curved lines. So it makes it more visible and and and actually prettier too as far as what I call as a management diagram. Insert timers and workflows. So I wanna go through and add a timer. Like, for instance, if I've got a job that has a wait from that's coming from another product, and it's got a wait process internally to it, and it says I'm gonna wait two minutes before I'm going to run the next time. We'll take and insert a timer in between the predecessor and that actual running of that task. So that way you can actually see that you're waiting two minutes before that job is running. So it's a it's a very visually visually ability for you to be able to see more see more how that thing is scheduled. If objects aren't being used, we can remove them right off the bat. And this is all pre conversion that we're doing. If you have, like, TWS titles, you have things like that that had a daily load time, you come in at six o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock in the morning, you know, do we wanna put a load time for this? We can we can accommodate that as well. Because we're an event processing system, we don't do loads. We don't do schedules by day. We don't load a schedule for a day. We basically create our events or processes to run whenever you want them, by time based or by some kind of an event such as a file coming in or another task that are running. Don't wanna display my system counters, I can do that. Don't wanna add a suffix to it? We like to add suffixes to our end of our workflows for when we do conversions. So that way, when we do timers or task monitors, what we can do is basically say, okay, I can look for a specific date now. And that the workflow ran because what this will happen is this tells me the last date and the name of the trigger date is what that variable is for. And we provide that variable for you. And I'll show you that in a little bit. Business services, if you're familiar with our product, you know what a business service It's just a container. It's like a name of an application group. So if you're on payroll, you know, whatever, however you wanna go down the line. Applications can be sub apples, can be, know, what however you go through that. So you can create that business service area if you wanted to. Do I wanna prefix out my my jobs? So if I wanna have a an environment, like a prefix into there so I can say, check this off and put whatever the prefix is there, I can create a variable as that as well, like PRD or something like that. Don't wanna change the task name. You can also change the task name. Here's one where I'm gonna in position one, I'm gonna put a variable for ENV. So maybe every task in production, you're gonna have a you're gonna have three separate environments, production, development, and test. Well, each task will start with a t, a p, or a d. So maybe instead of creating, the task one three different task names, I create one task name with a variable in front of it. So you can do something like that. And that can be all done right right from the conversion tool. You don't have to go back in and modify things after the fact. Generate only one present input as far as task monitors. If something has the product has a task monitor and it's earning only there today, Do I wanna create that task monitor again? Yes. Do we wanna do that? And then in CA seven, as you're aware, you have a look back feature. Well, that's our task monitor relative span. If I put a negative number into that, that's looking back x amount of hours. And then what format am I gonna put the XML? Is the is the output gonna go to? Do I wanna put it all into one directory? Do I wanna use it to find the output directory? I mean, what format as far as the date and time format do I want that file to be in? So that's basically your different options that you would have regardless of the product, regardless of the product that you're pulling in, the the scheduling tool. These are all as the file options that we utilize. So what I would come in here is your file. I'm gonna do CA. It opens CA seven files. And as you I if you got if you're familiar with CA seven, you have an Xevent that we can utilize if you have the if you're using that as well. So we can put that in here, or I'm gonna just point to my old job. And the workflow structure, do I wanna have jobs only with no workflows or wanna do workflow by schedule IDs? If you're familiar with CA seven, CA seven Sched IDs, they're the way they scheduled the same job on different days. So basically, the schedule ID, what we can do is create a workflow every time that new SCAD ID is generated. When CA seven schedule scan time? What time do you normally do a CA seven scan into the system? So now what's the what's the dwell time? What's the queue dwell time that you're setting that you set in the application? If you have SAP, do I wanna have the SAP variable setup? SAP connection, SAP credential, and then also the SAP command options. What are the different options within the SAP commands that you might wanna preset? Then all you do is just press start conversion. And what will happen is it'll go through up top here, as you see this little blue line, he's now converting the data. And he's gonna come back through and tell you how many how many are currently being extracted, what's the job information, you know, how long is it gonna take. This usually goes pretty quick. And once it's finished, you'll see on the list on left hand side over here, all the different data that was converted. You'll see by task as far as here, you'll see the credentials, the calendars, your agents, and then the the variables that potentially could have been created. And as this process is going through, you saw as it went through and did all that processing. So he's currently done processing. He's done three thousand nine hundred and ninety two tasks. And this kind of gives you the reporting, a little bit of a report information over here. It tells you how many warnings, if there are any errors within the data. So for instance, if that data had a problem when we tried to convert that or tried to, read the data, it would come back and say, you know, this I couldn't read this error, this this could be the error that was happening. And I can go into those different ports from here if I wanted to. It gives you how many what's the expected adjusted manual times. So in other words, manually, how long is it gonna take to adjust the data that just came through the system? That's not counting the data that we didn't we haven't looked at. So maybe somewhere else. But this is just how long it's gonna take to adjust the data that's currently that's gone through conversion. Gives you an estimate, three zero nine hours, expect the manual days, thirty eight days. So just to do this data right here, it's saying somewhere around thirty eight days to just validate and go through and kind of correct the errors. Now, of those errors could be the fact that jobs don't run. They're not scheduled to run after a certain date. And I'll show you the reports that are created from this. And as you see down here, it created three thousand nine hundred and ninety two tasks. It created six hundred twenty triggers, sixty four different business services, calendars, forty five different agents, eight different variables. You know, I said to I showed you pull the variables up. Here's that TR date that we talked about that we create. These two variables right here, create right off the bat no matter what. This TR date right here has a value, and it's telling me what it's gonna go, like, go to my trigger time. It's gonna format the date by trigger time, and it's gonna go by the hours, minutes, days, and years. So that's basically what this is gonna show you. The JCL lib, whatever the JCL lib was, it's gonna be called that. If there was something within your end value, it's gonna show you what JCL lib was pulled in. We don't need the JCL anymore unless we're gonna be creating OS job type jobs. If we're gonna create OS jobs, then we're gonna need what those JCL libraries and JCL members are. Chances are when we're converting from CA seven, a lot of the data we're converting from CA seven is gonna be data that's gonna run on the distributed platform, not no longer on a mainframe. And that's what we just we just did that last year. We converted a client straight off the mainframe, and he's running everything now from CA7. So your different JCL IDs, and it shows you the different information within that, and it creates variables for you. So you have that information tied now to a variable. So now if I wanna go back here, what I can do is say, okay, I'm gonna do file. And if I do create UAC XML files and I wanna do a bulk import format, the difference between these two is list input format will create multiple directories. A bulk input format allows me it creates one large file. So if I do bulk in for import, what'll happen is he's gonna create my bulk import. It's gonna write that data to that to a directory structure that has been defined. And what'll happen is once it's created and finished, then I can then take that data and import that data. So if I open up my my folder out here, what'll happen is that's just that this is writing the data. You'll see that in this directory where I'm gonna go back to my c s seven files, for instance, he's now creating this directory right here, and that's gonna be my bulk import. So as you can see, it's got today's date onto that. And he's ended. So that's all this data's here. So he's created all the data. Everything is set there. So that's all my data that I've created, the different information that I would then do a bulk import for. He's created another subdirectory called reports. And this is what I was talking about before was maybe there's some reports out there that we need to go on and we would look at. And how we look at these reports is if you look at these, it says review message. And if it's I, these are really informational. So we really kind of we ignore the informational reports. If you get in once you get down into the warning reports, you take a look and it tells you how many of these are items are in that report. So this one has, like, three hundred fifty one items in this. And if I look at this, this tells me this task, this last run date's older than two years. So do I wanna really convert that data? So, I mean, we have two options here. I really haven't created I haven't put anything into my controller yet. Everything's still sitting into a file. Now I can move everything into that that controller and then go back and utilize these reports to say, you know what? I wanna take this data and I wanna delete these specific jobs. And I can do that from the controller. So, you know, no big deal. It'd take me a while to do that, but I could do it. Or I can go from A, or second thing is I can go from the data and get rid of that. The problem with going and deleting the data that the client sent us is we don't really know if the dependencies are associated to it or how that if it's a high level job where that has the schedule associated to it. So we really don't wanna do that. So what we would do normally is take this report, send that to the client and say, what would you like us to do with this? We can convert the data, or do you wanna send us a new file after you've deleted all these tasks? So it's kind of an option of what we can what you can do with that. Then you go back to this. So this one's not a warning. It's seventy five tasks in here. And this says don't schedule. So that's really the same thing. So, okay, these are don't schedule after a certain date. So dates passed. So now what do you want me to do? So these are all the tasks that we really probably shouldn't wanna convert. And if you get into let's see, here's one's got ninety eight. This one says, okay, this is like more of like for us, it contains an ARF set. And if you are familiar with CA7, ARF is like their automated restart facility. It allows you to do is when something happens, we need to do something on CA7. So if this job fails, I wanna do an RF. I restart the job using some facility. We would then take note of these because we have the same kind of functionality called actions. And we would take that action and say, this action then has to be built similar to what you're doing today. We might not need to do anything with an action that we might be able to do that right at the task level or at a schedule level. So that's why we need to look at this. It's kind of one of these, let's adjust our processes to see what we really have to do. You don't always wanna we're always trying to schedule and convert apples to apples. So we always we don't ever wanna try to modify that because it's very hard to go back and try to look at something that you you've converted that now you've got nothing to compare against. So you always wanna try to convert it the exact same way that you're currently running it and then take advantage of it when time comes to when time comes. So, I mean, that's what these reports are for. And these other reports down here, these run skip, then these run skip task monitors and trigger schedule. These are actually other reports that tell us these are when we wanna trigger. These are this is our scheduling data. So we have other conversion utilities. They're JAR files that were written that we create that have been created that will take this data. We'll go through and take a look at this information, validate all the information with the client, say, okay, you know, what kind of for instance, this one's our trigger sched. That's for our trigger files. So what will happen is okay. So he's saying that he's gonna be coming out at due out time. His submit time is twelve thirty. And so what I would do is a submit time of one, which would be the time style. Time is gonna be twelve thirty. And then he's gonna run Sunday through Saturday. And then basically I will create that as a daily task because that's what we consider every day of the week. And then I would go on to the next step. And then and I keep going down the data, and every time I see one of these comps, I take a look. This this job runs Tuesday through Saturday, and he submits at four thirty. So what I would do is I would put a time in here at four thirty, and I say, instead of I'd say every down here and I come down here and I'd say Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday. And that way I would have that process set up. And I would you see, I'm using my default calendar too, because I don't with controller, we don't need to create a calendar for everything. You can have one calendar and then associate that to just about everything. A lot of our processes, you can schedule the triggers to run whenever you want, the tasks to run whenever you want just internally. So that kind of gives you an idea of some of the stuff that we're doing through here. And once I once I have the data, once I have these reports and I've got this information, I then go and I've created that XML file, I would then import it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up my my image. And what I would do here is at this point is I'm gonna bring in the data that I would I would just convert it. So how I would do that because because it was a bulk import, I would go back here and I go to the server operations and I come down here and say bulk import, and I would say run. And it would come back and it would import all of my data. I've already accomplished this because I didn't want those kind of accommodating for time here. And it would come back through run and it would give you all the tasks that were imported and also give you give you the process time or how long it took. And also, yeah, whether it was successful or not or whether there's errors somewhere. So then once it's all imported, you'd come back here and you'd come back and take a look at some of your tasks. So if I take a look at all my tasks, here's all the different tasks that are out there. And if I look at my Windows task or workflow task, let's take a look at one of these. If I can come out here, you know, it tells you that here's your workflow name. Notice that variable TRDates on here. It gives whatever descriptions we have in here. The default calendar, if it was associated, if it was being used, we're using default calendar. As far as the number of tasks, how many tasks are in that workflow, there is one down here. It's got thirty nine. And so if I take a look at that, and if I take a look at the edit this workflow, I can actually see the different information. Notice it kinda it kinda brings the information down to the bottom, and there's thirty nine tasks in here. Even if I try to pan this and bring this up, I'm not gonna see everything. There's a couple ways I can do that. I mean, I can actually minimize everything, to to a point where I say, if I do actual size, it's gonna be fairly large. But if I wanna say, you know, fit the window, I can do that. I can't read that. You know? So what I wanna do is I wanna go back to, you know, what it was before. And but I'll I'll use this facility called a pan. So I can actually take this pan out, this outline pan, and I actually send scroll across to wherever the box is. And it brings me to different areas so I can actually see the whole data as it's going from there. So that's one nice little facility that we can use. And also but if you know if you're looking for specifics, I can go find in workflow. And I can say anything that contains a TM. Right? I'm gonna say next. So it'll bring me right to where that is. And that's really a task monitor. So if I was to double click on that task monitor, it'll open up that information. Notice it's getting me a span time of twelve, but minus twelve hours, because that's what he took. That's what was in the task itself. And he took the minus twelve hours. So it's a look back at twelve for this. It's a specific task and that's the name of the task. It's on finish or success. And if you're unfamiliar with the controller, finish and success are basically the same thing. The difference being is finished means that somebody forced it to complete. It was not a successful action, but it was more of a forced completion to say, okay, I'm good with this result. I need to go on to the rest of the information, to the rest of the task. And as you go, as you see this outline, you can kinda kinda go through this. And then you can just kinda scroll through that, you need to find. So you can do you can launch the workflow if you want. So if I wanna pan back to the top, so something down there, can scroll that. And then, you know, the smaller workflows, obviously, if you got something like this, small workflow with two two items into it, know, that's what that's gonna look like. Okay? It's it's gonna show you there's here's two Linux tasks, and that's dependent on this one. I mean, the the workflow task, if I want to take a look in another way of looking at this, and I said do a right click on this workflow task commands, I want it to say view children. I can actually look at all the different items that are in this task. And if I open up each one of them, it'll tell me what if it's got a successor or predecessor associated to it and whether or not that you know, what's the condition of that. So it allows me to see the children, you know, at a high level at a text based view. So I don't have to open up the workflow. I can just open it up from here. You can also do the same thing at a tree base, and a tree is just gonna show you just everything that's in that. So if you view tree, it's gonna show you the workflow and everything that's in that workflow at a test level test I'm sorry, at a a text level. So it tells you the different types. And these fields over here, as with the columns and everything, you can move stuff around in the controller and you can move back and forth. You can insert your own columns if you wanted to. So if you wanted to do certain, if you want to see certain things in there, you can do that. So these are different pieces that you can do. Once the data is converted, you're you're all set. And what we've done within a matter of just this call is I've taken a large over three thousand jobs, close to four thousand of CA seven jobs, and converted them to not only tasks, but workflows, created other routines that can be schedules or that could be identified with the schedules and allows me to now get started. So Joe had a slide up earlier that that basically said, okay, it's gonna take you x amount of days to build perform things manually. Well, think about it. I what I just did is I built three thousand tasks, over three thousand tasks and workflows in a matter of fifteen minutes. What you would do in a matter of fifteen minutes is probably build two tasks. You wouldn't even build a workflow at that point. So you're still on investigative. So it's really kind of this tool is very, very beneficial, very, very helpful. And it's very, very it works real quick. And like I said, it works not only in here, but it works also with other products as well. So if I go back into the tool itself, if I wanted to go and also go and clear this file, for instance. I awesome. I'm sorry. Also, I can also go out and get objects from my controller pull them into the tool and maybe make modifications internally to the tool. I can delete the objects too, and I can verify the objects. So there's this tool does a lot more than just convert. So if I was to come out here and say, clear all my lists, that basically just clears the data that I imported. I'm kinda I wanna show you just basically a a CSV file. I mean, it's a real basic CSV file. It's pretty simple. But if I look at this this file here and I say, and interpret the file, it's gonna come back and it'll interpret. There's only two tasks there. But it was basically, it's all it is, a CSV file. I can show you the CSV. And in that file, it's gotta have a job. Here's my header. Right? The job name, my host, user command argument. So that's the name of the job. That's the host. Right? And the name of the job is right here. Here's your host and there's your command. So basically, if I was to go and put this process in or import this process or create the UAC, I have two tasks to build. So I can create a CSV file if I wanted to, right, and or using anything, Excel spreadsheet or whatever, create that CSV file, and then just import the data. And that would allow me to import at least get my tasks and my workflows built. So you're ahead of the game. You're far you're a lot further ahead of the game. That's all I have as far as on the conversion tool goes, and what conversion process, how we do it. I think at this point, I think Marissa, I think we can open up the questions and also invite in the people from Blue Cross. Yes. So while I am inviting our special guests for Q and A, who by the way are coming from Blue Cross Blue Shield Minnesota, so I'll let them introduce themselves in just a moment. Thanks, Mike, for the demo. And I will just start you guys off with a question that's been waiting. This one's actually for Joe. So if you could pop back on Joe, but I think either of you could probably answer. Can you elaborate about optimization post migration? What data are required to get the recommendation from Stone Branch to improvise the solution? Optimization. Go ahead, Joe. I'm not quite sure I understand the question. What about you? Can't hear you. Yes, I was just saying that there are a couple of different possibilities. Sometimes, firstly, what happens during the transition process, there might be improvements that are identified, potential improvements that we identify, something that involves exploiting a feature in the stone branch tool set or just something about the way that the code is written that we'd like to improve. But if we can, we'd like to hold off on trying to have too many moving parts during the transition phase. So we might come back after the fact once everything is stable in production and do some refactoring, some process improvement. Also, we do very often do health checks where we come in with a checklist of items to look at to ensure that the StoneBranch product is running efficiently in your environment. So there are a few different possibilities for that optimization phase and what we focus on. Okay, great. Thank you. Next question is from and I'm still working on getting our special guests in. But next question we have in the meantime is from Patrick. With a CA7 conversion, will you automatically convert and absorb hashtag JI, hashtag JO and hashtag SCC? Hopefully you all know what that means. Right. Yeah, the job inserts, job overrides. Those are in the JCL. And what we'll do is we'll take a look at the JCL library and we'll take that information there as well. And that will be converted as well. Excellent. Next question from Aloysio. This toolkit convert power center. Sorry, I'm I think these are two questions combined. But it says this toolkit maybe converts power center Informatica jobs question mark. There is control M it says. We just had that call this morning, in regard had a question like that this morning in regards to Informatica itself. We can run Informatica workflows. We can run that information, those tasks from the controller. The actual conversion of the Informatica schedules, we don't do at this time. But it doesn't say we won't be able to do it. I'm just saying at this point, we don't know enough about what needs occur within that to be able to say that we can't modify the tool to make that work. Okay. Let's see, I've got two of our three guest panelists on. Welcome, guys. I'm adding here one last one. Scott's on the way. Will you ever be able to export a tree view? That is from John. Export a tree view. So that's I'm not sure we can do that at this point. I don't know if that's something in the works of column those in like that. Perhaps Colin does know something. Maybe he will let us know. For the meantime, I'll move on to the next question also from John. Is oh, there's Colin. There's Colin. There's Colin. Give me a moment to find all the buttons to pull my camera up and unbait myself and so on. So the tree view, currently we don't allow printing it back, so I've made a note of that. That's a fair request, so you can get for the workflows in the definitions of the task instances, you can select the tree view, but that's not currently printable. Will make a note of it. We will look into that. Okay. So unknown, but possible that it may happen one day. So Mike, Mike, Scott and Pito on from We have Yes, we now have Mike, Scott and Pito. You're all here. Thank you all for joining us. Mike, Scott and Pito are all from Blue Cross Blue Shield, Minnesota, and they are a customer of ours who have agreed to join us. So thank you for coming. Thank you. No problem. And feel free to let us know if you would like to hop in and answer a question with an experience that you all had in your conversion process as we go through. We have a few more questions. And everyone who's listening, please feel free to submit your questions for Blue Cross Blue Shield Minnesota if you have questions about their experience. Next question we have is also it's from John. He asked is LDate, Let's see underscore l date underscore dollar sign bracket TR date, close bracket, a variable that is shifted with UAC shipped with UAC. Sorry. No, that's something that we do. It's just a variable that's with the conversion, but we can provide that anybody who wants it. It's pretty simple. All it is is you can call the L date, TR date, whatever you want. But basically the format date formula is something that's part of, if you look into the formula functions and help, you can actually take a look at how you could format the date, and we formatted it using an ops trigger ops trigger time. Okay, great. We have a question now from Len. Any experience with converting from ESP to UAC? We're actually doing that today. We're there's a very large client in Canada and also in central central US that we're currently doing an ESP conversion. Yeah, and we've done them before. Quite a few times, right? Yeah, there's a few of them actually, we had a couple of ex employees from that shop as well. Very good. Next question. Hi, if we convert from control M using XML, will this convert historical data as well? What we'll do is we'll take your current data that like, for instance, your job data and, anything that's in your database, and we'll convert that data. We don't we don't go I'm not sure what what historical data you're talking about. Is that, like, old runtimes? Good question. Maybe I'll have that back. Yeah. Maybe we can get some more info from ah, yes. He said yes. Yeah. We wouldn't go back and convert the old runtime. We would just or history of it. We would just convert what's currently out there as far as scheduling data. Okay. While we're waiting on some more questions, everyone feel free to submit any questions you have for us or for the guests. I thought, Joe, why don't we go ahead and ask Blue Cross Blue Shield some questions about their own experience. So, Mike, if you wouldn't mind sharing, would you be able to share with us your observations in how how things went transitioning off of the mainframe to stone branch? Any just things that come to mind right away? Yes, The conversion went very smoothly with Stone Branch's plan that they provided for the milestone and stakes. We met those objectives with the help of Stone Branch on time and was actually off the mainframe approximately three months earlier than expected. The conversion went very, very well. The support from Stone Branch at all levels was quite exceptional. It was a very good process concerning how much stuff we had to move off the mainframe and many other projects going on. Went very well. Very cool. That's great to hear. I didn't know we were we were finished that early too. That's excellent. Always like to hear when a project is finished earlier than scheduled. Yes. Mike or Joe, do you have anything that you think might be interesting to discuss with Blue Cross Blue Shield while they're here with us? And anyone who's listening, please let us know if you have anything you'd like to ask them. I'm happy to relay your questions. Yes, just the thing, you know, with support we had, even internally with Blue Cross Blue Shield, I mean, took off from the beginning, and we had our stakeholder meeting. From that point on, everybody was together with the ideas that this is what's going to happen. And everybody just got together. And I think Blue Cross was great with the fact that being able to manage a project internally and also, you know, help us out when we needed to, when we needed to make changes or something had to happen. They were right there. They there was a couple of them that I think, that didn't even know the product. They Actually, nobody knew the product, but some of them didn't know CA-seven that were actually doing a convert with us on a conversion. And they learned basically how to schedule from our controller to help them with CA-seven. And I think that was the ease of use on the scheduling. I think I think Mike and Scott or Pito can talk to that. It's very I mean, trying to go from CA seven to a GUI interface, which is very, very simple to use. But these guys, these guys were great. I mean, they just stood up and tackle it and no questions, no questions asked at all. That's great. Yeah. Blue Cross Blue Shield, maybe one of you can take this question for me, actually. How did you all successfully kind of build that culture of buy in to switch over? Was that difficult for you? Or was there a key person that you needed to convince? Or was it something about Stoneridge that made it an easy sell on your side? Could you repeat the question again? I'm sorry. Oh, sure. I was just wondering because Mike was just talking to Mike A was just talking to how easy it was to work with you all on the transition and how you were sort of great cheerleaders for us. And that helps the transition go smoothly. I was wondering if there were any challenges on your side with buy in from leadership or any obstacles that you all met that you had to overcome that then helped you create a culture of buy in, so that you could successfully transition off the mainframe without any, any whining or arguments along the way? Well, I mean, we were a CA seven shop for roughly thirty years. And many of the CA-seven schedulers were now, you know, Stone Branch schedulers now. And getting them on board with this at times was some challenge. But at this point, everybody loves the tool. One of the great things I love about the tool from my personal perspective is definitely there's no downtime when you're doing patching or any kind of maintenance work. It's got an A side, B side, patch A side, take it down, patch the A side, bring it back up, make sure everything is connected, drop down the B side, bring it up, take it down, patch it, bring it up. Everything's never missed a beat. No job failed. No, no task failed. The business really, really, really, really likes this a lot loves the tool. That's great. Yeah. So I guess the proof's in the pudding. This is actually a question for you all, Mike, Scott and Pito. For you, how much legacy workload do you still execute on the mainframe? JCL jobs specifically? Currently, I think about, I think it's about four thousand. Four thousand jobs we're still going. Cool, thank you. Next question is maybe for us, Mike and Joe, not about migration, but with ServiceNow ticketing automation, is there a way to update a jobs note outside of the GUI? We are this is maybe for Colin. We are thinking to use notes to inform ticketing tool on how to handle tickets, assignment, priority, etcetera, and do mass updates if possible. That's from Albert. When we interface with ServiceNow to open the tickets, there's also there's awesome setups and that you can do that through universal task and everything that allow us. I think there's I I one of our one of the consultants here put together a process that will it's like a little mini workflow that you can actually run, send variables, send everything over to ServiceNow, do whatever you need with that, and also continue to update that same ticket. I don't know about adding the change control. Think there was something that there was a seminar earlier about doing something like that, wasn't there, Colin? So I guess really the question was the generic knowledge for Proofix to provide, so yeah, their APIs provide delay to make those updates, so whatever your requirements are, And there are certain fields available as well that you can use for those kind of things that you can add the updates in. So there are a couple of user defined fields that customers use for those kind of things, so you can define those fields in the properties, label them how you want. It could be a change record number or something, and then when you do a change, you can update the definition through the APIs if you want to, or if you're talking about putting a ticket number on a failed job, there's the operational memo available for that, and again, all the user defined fields that you can use for that, and the APIs are available to call from whatever program you're driving this from. So yes is the answer to the question. If you want to get involved in a discussion offline, then just reach out to me, my information. Probably not on this presentation, but reach out to us and they'll find me and I'll have a conversation with you. Yeah, we'll make sure that that happens. Next question comes from Pierre. He says he would love to see a practical example of a JCL conversion and JCL containing several steps, eventually with logic in the steps, if then else. Yeah, we could probably provide that. I can't do that today because I don't have the data for that. That's something we could probably do some other time. Great. Pierre, we'll be in touch with you to Colin, and this is to Mike A. Next question from also for Stonebranch. Can the conversion tool convert Zeke data? This conversion tool let me see. There's I'm looking at it now. We do we do a z conversions. We don't necessarily use this one conversion tool. Like I mentioned, this is just one of many conversion tools that we have. So we have other conversion tools that convert to z data, but not this XCT tool that I'm looking at. Yeah. There's nothing here for Zeke, but we do do do we do Zeke data, but it's more of it's through a different a different tool that we have. Okay. But we do have it, just not necessarily this one we've demonstrated today. Correct. But it works the same way. So next question. A question around patching, applying maintenance. Does Stonebridge charge additionally for this service in case we need help? Or will it be helped by a normal support channel upgrading the version? Mean, so there you're looking for assistance for upgrading from version eight or version version six dot x to, to whatever, I would assume, yeah. Yeah, so we would provide services for something like that. That's not something that we just automatically do, but yeah, there would be a services engagement that we could help with that if you wanted to. I'll just add, there are a few options. It can be pure services or we're also starting up some enhanced support services that give you those kinds of facilities as part of your support and maintenance agreement. So a few different options there. So one other thing to mention there is we also run software as a service for the controller. So if you're a customer of that, we actually take care of those upgrades for you. That's part of the service you purchase for us running the system in the cloud for you. It's a potential option. Always nice when it's built in. Any further questions? I'll wait maybe a minute or so more. If any of you have just started attending our sessions today, I just wanted to let you know that we have upcoming our final session of this series, which will be a developer roundtable, which is always very popular when it's in person. So I don't imagine anything otherwise. It's always very informative, the developers and other stuff, of course, and they always have great answers to all of your questions, so we definitely recommend that you attend that. I'll make sure that I share a link to register for it while anyone else submits final questions. And if Joe or Mike, if you have any last questions for Blue Cross Blue Shield about their experience, feel free to ask them. Appreciate them being on a call. Exactly. Thanks. Thanks so much for joining guys. No problem. If anybody has any questions, ask. Yep. Great. Okay, so I think we will close the session. Thank you, everybody.