Re: VAX to Alpha

[Chuck Piecham <chuck@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Cliff:

This exact same situation was seen by the city of Cambridge when they
upgraded to Alpha from VAX.

In their case, very specific purchase order bid forms/legal contracts had
been generated by VMS Wordperfect into a mail merge document.

MS word was able to import the WordPerfect document, from the VAX, and
create an exact copy Word mail merge document.
Automation was accomplished via WRQ Reflection File transfer commands
inserted into ADMINS command files and Word Macros.

The major difficulty: Wordperfect mailmerge uses a

Start Record
Field 1
Field 2
Field 3
Field n
End Record

mail merge format.

MS Word uses a CSV file format with a header record containing field names.
So the mail merge data source generation (usually a report) process needs
to be modified.

There are several issues which need to be addressed on a site specific
basis,  like central storage of WORD mail merge documents,for PC
users,  central storage and access to VMS generated mail merge data sources
(the CSV files)  from PC based MS WORD users, for batch processing, but
overall the WordPerfect import features on MS WORD make this a pretty
straightforward port with the only stumbling  block (per procedure) being
the conversion of WordPerfect format mail merge to Word CSV.

regards

Chuck Piecham

At 09:19 AM 6/23/2003 -0700, you wrote:
> We will hopefully have our first Alpha server pretty shortly.  One of the
> tools/techniques we have been using here at the City of Santa Rosa for
> years will not be available.  We have been using a VAX based version of
> WordPerfect to produce letters, with ADMINS REPORT creating the merge
> list.  WordPerfect, from what I understand will not be available on the
> Alpha.  Some of these are interactive procedures.  As we are almost all
> using PCs running Windows 2000, and PC WORD and WordPerfecat are
> available, the interactive procedures we can modify to download the merge
> list and use the PC tool to do the merge.  However, several of the
> procedures do not lend themselves to this as they are done as part of the
> overnight processing and a manual next day step is not desirable.
>
> Back to the past.  We still have a few ADMINS RNF letters which work fine
> and get the job done for the simple stuff.  We have started down the path
> of converting the bulk of these to Reports creating RNF files rather than
> merge lists.
>
> I am hoping for suggestions or alternatives for the more complex
> documents.  What we had with the WordPerfect techinque was the ability to
> let our power application users make changes to the forms and letter which
> the ADMINS data was merged with.  Not being limited to fixed width fonts,
> they have been able to come up with some very complex forms and letters.
>
> Anybody doing something like this on the Alpha or have suggestions on how
> this might be accomplished?
>
> Thanks,
> Clif