Articles - Get your developers up to speed and web-enable your legacy system at the same time

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Get your developers up to speed and web-enable your legacy system at the same time

Alcan developers attend .NET and Flynet Viewer training course, developed to upgrade their AS/400 RPG programming knowledge, to meet demand for Viewer skills.

A key responsibility of IT Directors today is to ensure that IT staff have the right skills to do their jobs effectively. With the particularly fast pace of innovation in IT and strict deadlines for IT projects, it can be a struggle to find a good time for staff to attend training. How can you know that these new skills will be used to improve your business?

Flynet offers custom training courses with well-defined goals, which include the implementation of a real application for your organisation. The .NET and Flynet Viewer training course is one example, which was developed to meet demand for Viewer skills. Alcan Smelting developers attended this course in July 2004.

The course involved an introduction to .NET and an applied course on Flynet Viewer at Flynet's training facility close to the City of Cambridge, followed by the implementation of a friendly, web-based user interface for an AS/400 application at Alcan's Lynemouth Smelter Works in Newcastle. The curriculum was developed to offer a seamless learning experience with each part building on the previous one to provide developers with a comprehensive skill set.

The first two days of .NET training were conducted by DevTrain, a UK-based .NET training company, and took into account the specific skills of the attendees. The main attendee, Steven Neailey, had been trained to use Cool:2e (for RPG programming) and was later educated in Visual Basic 6. The .NET course extended his existing skills-base by first illustrating the differences between VB6 and VB.NET and then concentrating on web technology.

The next three days built on the.NET training to give a hands-on introduction to Flynet Viewer. Trainees installed the product and used the Administration Console to configure it. They then built an entire web application using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and VB.NET for a simulated 'virtual host'. They gained practical experience with recording a host, mapping its fields and programming using the .NET library interface to the host (which is automatically generated by Viewer).

“The course accelerated my learning so that I can realistically go away and start work with Viewer. I also hope that I will be able to use my understanding of .NET for other Alcan projects.”

Steven Neailey, Alcan Trainee.

The last four training days were spent on-site with a Flynet trainer, who oversaw the development of a browser-based interface for Alcan's Cast order and Sawing Detail Entry system. A manual recording process was in place where operators would record details on paper and then enter them by hand into the iSeries system at another time and location. It was time consuming, error prone and urgently needed to be automated.

“We have in-house RPG skills and wanted to implement the business logic on our iSeries but needed to improve the usability for users,” Steve explained. “Flynet Viewer is easy to use and we've been able to solve this problem in just one month. The course has been intense, but very useful and we plan to use Viewer to streamline many more AS/400-based systems in the near future.”

Flynet can help to web-enable your systems from start to finish, providing easy to use host integration tools and training for your developers so that they can continue to enhance your legacy systems, saving you money and time.