Finally! All Character Sets Without the Gibberish
Media Control GfK International Goes Unicode

The Company

Media Control GfK International identifies and analyzes the entertainment industry’s worldwide sales figures in the areas of music, video, games and books. The company then makes this data available in its online database; it has over 1,500 customers who utilize it to gain orientation for their product development and positioning. In terms of IT, the company has 150 employees who use a total of roughly 400 applications, all of which have been developed on System i in RPG.

The Challenge

Media Control GfK International works in a global indus-try and is becoming a global player itself. Yet its legacy apps only allowed for one character set. This became very annoying when Eastern European languages had to be worked with, not to mention that Japanese or Chinese characters were entirely out of the question. A solution had to found, one that could:

• process and display any character set from around the world,
  
• carefully mesh with the existing architecture while safeguarding running operations,
  
• and keep modernization efforts to the lowest possi-ble minimum.

The Decision

The IT department did its homework and found out
that there was only one single tool out there that could simultaneously modernize the user interface while offer-ing Unicode support:
The tool from PKS.

The Procedure

1. All databases were recompiled with the new charac-ter set for graphical data.
   CCSID 1200 was used for this.
   
2. Together with PKS, the apps to be converted were analyzed and the time needed for each application was calculated.
   
3. PKS then carried out the conversion with automated processes.
   
4. Both companies worked together to assess the indi-vidual results and clarify additional requirements.

Finally, individual screen masks were tweaked and the applications were extended with the desired additional functions.

Benefits

• All conceivable fonts from Cyrillic to Chinese can now be displayed and worked with.
  
• The staff embraced the new interface since it was modern and easy to understand,
  “a bit like Windows®.”
  
• Existing applications were made sustainable with a minimum amount of effort.
  
• During the entire project, running operations continued smoothly.
  There were no “secondary conversion costs.”

In the future, all further developments and new require-ments are to be made and met with the tool from PKS.

What the Customer Says

“This is a very user-friendly package for the simple localization of existing apps that are based on System i on 5250. I can recommend it without any hesita-tion. PKS also provided excellent support throughout the entire project – from the briefing to ongoing help desk support.”
Mr. Michael Kuhlen, IT Director of
Media Control GfK International