Superior Court of California, Stanislaus County System

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Court saves over $700,000 annually by migrating its legacy system

Excerpt from Microsoft .NET Customer Solution Whitepaper, published August 2003.

Situation

The Superior Court Stanislaus County System, located in Modesto, California, outgrew its aging Case Management system. The system was more than ten years old and still served some of the basic functions required of the Court system; however, due to the increased number of cases and caseworkers, the performance of this legacy system deteriorated to unacceptable levels and had become costly and burdensome to maintain.

The Superior Court Stanislaus County System determined that it needed to explore its options for updating the Case Management system to meet current and future demands. An independent consulting group was brought in to determine what improvements could be made to the existing system and if cost savings could be realized. The resulting report recommended that the Court migrate to a modern, distributed environment. The existing system was an IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS)-essentially an IBM mainframe running CICS software. The Court's Case Management system consisted of 785 separate COBOL programs.

Solution

The Superior Court Stanislaus County System has now successfully ported the Case Management system off of the mainframe and has introduced its new, distributed, transaction-based application for managing court cases. Built on the Microsoft® .NET Framework, the new case management system runs on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Advanced Server. To develop the new system, the Court used Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET along with Fujitsu Software Corporation's NetCOBOL™ for .NET-language add-in software designed specifically for the .NET Framework.

The Superior Court Stanislaus County System originally decided to port its Case Management system off of the mainframe using Java, beginning the process in January 2002. In May 2002, with many of the programs converted, user testing began. Response times were significantly better than the old system, but developers noticed scalability problems as they increased the number of programs that were converted to the new system. Thinking they had worked around the problem, the court conducted a load test in September 2002, with a realistic number of users tapping into the system at once.

"That's when we hit a brick wall," says Raul Menendez, a consultant on the project. "We came up with a way to work around one problem only to run into more problems. The system just wasn't going to scale that well. These problems primarily involved the Java compiler that we were using and the calls made to the Oracle database. In addition, we began to look at the work we'd done so far and it was clear that the system was becoming complex and messy. It was starting to seem as though the new system would be a nightmare to manage."

While trying to solve one of these problems, the developers used Visual Studio .NET and were especially impressed by the ease with which they were able to convert Java code to Microsoft Visual J#™. The Court began to rethink its strategy and researched other options, especially options that leveraged Microsoft .NET technologies. The Court learned of Fujitsu's NetCOBOL for .NET and decided that it would convert the CICS Case Management system to a Windows-based system.