powersoft

Appeon PowerBuilder Consultants

Development, Migrations and Support

Powersoft has a long history with PowerBuilder dating back to the very early days. We have gained the reputation of "The PowerBuilder Experts" with our consultants and knowledge of the language. We are an independent software house who specialises in helping support their customer's PowerBuilder applications. We have been trading for over 30 years and are proud of our success.

appeon powerbuilder consultants

We work closely with Appeon helping with the development of the PowerBuilder Product. Powersoft is positioned as the European centre for Appeon PowerBuilder Consultancy and Support.

If you have systems written in PowerBuilder then you do not need to redevelop them with all the risk and cost that involves. We can help you migrate to a later version and then enhance your application to bring it forward and up-to-date, saving you time and money. Powersoft provides experienced consultants from Project Managers to Developers and for short and long-term assignments/projects and can tailor our services to meet our customers needs.

Powersoft offer a fully customised support for your application, this can range from full 1st level support to 3rd level support as and when it is needed. We see support as the most important service we offer and our customers will testify to the quality of support we give.

PowerBuilder to C# Migrations

Leverage Appeon 2022 Cloud Technologies

Full migration support from the initial consultancy, analysis and planning. Through to rollout and support.

We work with your development team to build their skills and ensure that the project objectives are fully met. From replacing EAServer to completely redeveloping the UI layer in Web Technologies we have the expertise and skill to guide you.

Our Approach to Your Project....

Customer Focused Projects

  • Assessment of your code base, skills and needs.
  • Full proposal to deliver your exact requirements.
  • Working with your team to develop their skills whilst delivering the solution.
  • Utilise our expertise to make the development changes.
  • Deliver a cost effective solution, on time and on budget.

Call Now +44(0)1293 562730

Customer Projects

Below are some of the projects that we have worked on. We have many others in Financial Services, Property Management, Online Retail and General Businesses.

Western University

western university
The Brief

Western University, London, Ontario needed a consultant to extract the business knowledge from their PowerBuilder application. They commissioned Powersoft to document the key business functions based on the PowerBuilder code in their application.

Although this was a simple brief the challenge of accurately extracting the business logic from a PowerBuilder application was complex. Nonetheless the Powersoft consultants working on the project delivered the solution within quoted budget and on time.

Teachers Assurance

teachers assurance
The Brief

 Teachers Assurance has a substantial CRM/policy administration system, developed in PowerBuilder (PB) and deployed with EAServer. This application was developed in 2002 and has been maintained until now by another software house. The application is critical to Teachers' business. 

Some of the issues were: 

  1. The underlying database was running at Oracle 8 and needed to be migrated to Oracle 11.
  2. The client & server applications were running on Windows 2000 and needed to move to Windows 2008 server and Windows 7 clients.
  3. The application was integrated with Office 2000 and needed to be integrated with Office 2010.

Powersoft were initially employed by Teachers Assurance to resolve a previous migration issue, which was quickly and successfully resolved for a small, fixed price (no fix no fee basis). This gave Teachers Assurance confidence to move forward without any commercial risk.

Powersoft's Solution

 The second phase was to take the PowerBuilder source and migrate that to PowerBuilder 12.5 and EAServer 6.3.1. The migration work was very involved due to the size of the application and we had to rewrite some legacy Java code in PowerBuilder, because the Java code did not work in EAS5.5 or EAS6.3. The upgraded system was delivered back to Teachers on time and to plan, who then commenced an extensive testing programme. 

Powersoft were on hand to provide support during the testing phase and resolved the few issues raised, both extremely quickly and efficiently. The project was successfully implemented.

Cowi DK

cowi dk
The Brief

COWI have an application called Caretaker which is developed in Powerbuilder (PB). This application was being developed and maintained using version 7 and had not been successfully migrated to a later version of PB. 

There had been a number of issues that prevented the migration to newer version of Powerbuilder and stopped COWI making the most of the newer technologies available in these later versions of PB. 

Some of these issues were:

  1. Access to MS SQL server causes errors on some of the data retrieval.
  2. Access to MS SQL Server has to be via ODBC and not a native driver.
  3. The existing translation software does not work.

In addition to the need to migrate to the latest version of PB the application needed to be brought up-to-date and COWI wanted to have the user interface updated to look more like a modern windows application and to also support the modern Windows platforms.

Powersoft's Project

We proposed a multi phased approach to this project, with clearly defined deliverables and direct business benefits to COWI. This approach reduced the time that Powersoft had to hold the Caretaker source and therefore allowed COWI to continue to develop the application with minimal interruption. 

The first phase was a migration to Powerbuilder 11.5 as the latest version of PB available. 

The second phase was a bespoke development of a piece of software that would translate the application dynamically into any language. 

The third and final phase was to enhance the GUI and user experience and to bring the application right up to date with a modern look and feel.

Inara Transfers

Inara
The Brief

Inara have a Powerbuilder application that operates in their money transfer shops in London. Inara are an independent company specialising in sending money across the globe for their customers. 

As part of their business development they wanted to enable the back office solution onto the web and mobile devices. The web site needed to be slick and user friendly and deliver a secure way for clients to send money around the world. 

We were tasked with designing and developing the web solution and the integration to the back office solution. In order to deliver a robust secure solution we assisted with the migration of the PB application from SQL Anywhere to SQL Server, this immediately give performance improvements and gave us a solid platform to develop the web frontend. 

Powersoft then designed and developed the frontend web site application using Microsoft dot Net technologies that were integrated in real-time to the back end system. This enables clients using any PC or mobile device to get a quote and send money anywhere in the world with just a few clicks. The seamless integration to Inara's existing system allowed them to leverage their investment and meant that they could handle the growth in business without extra staffing. 

Whilst working on the system Inara needed to apply for their PSD2 FCA approval and we were able to help with that process because of our robust system design and specifications. 

Powersoft used the best technologies to deliver the right solution whilst securing their existing investment in software.