I am investigating several Client Server issues that have been presented by
one of our key third party applications providers and would like to tap into
the collective wisdom, insight, and saneness(or insanity if you prefer) of
the list.  My first poll to you is this:  Have you any experience or heresy
about the following:
 
1).  Forte' as an application development tool?
 
2).  Micro Focus COBOL?  Specifically, any market exposure to a company
called DevTech Migrations which provides toolsets that covert HP3000 COBOL
to MF COBOL.
 
3).  Translation of MPE intrinsics to POSIX intrinsics???  DevTech also
provides tools for modeling and migration of Image data to relational
equivalents(Oracle, etc.) and Image Intrinsics to Embedded SQL.
 
As you may have gathered, the application provider has done some
due-diligence in investigating how to migrate a HP3000 environment to UNIX.
 Several times within their documentation, they reference the word
'efficient'.  Being the diehard HP3000 bigot that I am, I am not going to
start the argument of efficiency because I am sure that most of you will
concur that the HP3000 can be made more efficient than the best 'Open
System' environment.  I do want to provide a 'watchdog' consultative
approach to my relationship with the vendor and at the same time not get
stuck in an 'I told you so' mode.  Any help you can provide me that would
allow me to intelligently and authoritatively support the investigative
process is most welcome.  Thanks in advance, Tom Stelter, Manager Tech
Services, M-CARE [log in to unmask]