by Jean Driscoll, Holiday Retirement Corp.
Our company has been using PeopleSoft World and EnterpriseOne for more than six years. After our upgrade in April 2003 to the AS/400, upgrading the operating system to V5R2 and OneWorid service pack upgrade, we started having some performance issues. Most of those issues we have worked out with IBM. However, we noticed that in our environments that had less data, reports and inquiries ran a lot faster. So we began a project to purge and archive the old data that wasn’t being used.
There are a couple sides to a purge/archive project. One is defining what you are going to purge/archive. Another task is to determine which tool you will use to accomplish this. Our users quickly came up with a purge date – we would keep all data from current year plus two full years back. We will be archiving the data to another new archive environment so we can access any data that is not in production using the normal PeopleSoft tools.
I have supported World software for many years and have been through the whole financial purge process and at previous customers had created our own purge procedures us ing POOPURGE. I was not ready to start that all over again. I started looking for a business partner and found that two products are available for purging/archiving data on the AS/400: iTera Purge & Archive and DCSoftware ARCTOOLS. We eventually chose ARCTOOLS.
The installation was pretty seamless. The software was sent to me ahead of time, and I was able to restore it to the AS/400 in three easy steps; create a library, create a user and then restore. So our installation time was spent going over the menus and system in general, and then putting training materials together.
I have a group of about 12 “super users” who are super. I was hoping to get at least a couple of interested parties for each of the Financial, A/R and A/P meetings. I ended up with all of them for the whole two and a half days and had to move to a bigger conference room for the work groups.
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