Opening a window to the world

Most organisations wishing to open up some of their legacy systems to the web do not wish to change their applications, writes Nick Enticknap, who explains the practical options available.

Talk e-business, and people think of exotic B2B markets and spectacular B2C applications. But for many companies, the requirements of e-business are more basic; to make the facilities of existing tried and trusted applications available to a wider reach.

Internal staff can be trained in the complexities of legacy systems. But staff within business partners, and even more so the general public, cannot be expected to use legacy systems unless accessing them is completely intuitive.

The ideal solution is to re-engineer legacy systems completely. But for many companies this is impracticable. It involves a large up front investment. It requires IT staff to become familiar with new technologies such as Java, or Microsoft's Com. And it involves discarding systems which work, where the business logic is sound, and where in many cases there has been recent substantial investment in ensuring Year 2000 compliance.

Source: ComputerWeekly
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