Our Client was a large Belgian utilities company, with several national sites and headquartered in Brussels.  They had already completed a thorough Y2K investigation of their mainframe computers, and were now interested in determining the status of their PC environment.  They presented us with a number of requirements:

1. The solution had to be automated.  Owing to an environment of several thousand PCs, it would be completely impractical to visit each desktop individually.
2. The solution had to be unobtrusive.  User interaction and inconvenience were to be kept to an absolute minimum.
3. The solution had to be reproducible.  Several other company sites would hope to deploy our solution next.

We began by sitting with the company IT managers, to determine the exact working environment – network protocols, network architecture, OS install base, and network capacity limits were all assessed.  This gave us the information we needed to determined the best way to distribute the Y2K assessment software we had chosen (after a thorough product comparison).

Second, we segmented the deployment into groups that included LAN machines, WAN machines, non-networked machines, and servers.  A small test lab was installed at the client site, and a group of production test machines was identified for small-scale live testing. A scanning procedure was developed for each group of machines; also, SQL Server 7.0 was installed and prepared on one of the client's servers, to house the Y2K scanning results.

Third, silent network scanning was initiated (via an NT logon script), and scan diskettes were developed for testing non-networked machines and server BIOS compliance.  As the Y2K data was captured, it was evaluated for consistency.   Several known problems inherent to the software package were also corrected at this time, and the data was ultimately imported into SQL Server.

Finally, table Views were developed in SQL Server, and a linked Microsoft Access database application – with advanced on-screen and hardcopy filtering and reporting capability – was developed.  After all data had been captured and loaded, we presented a written and verbal summary of our findings to company management.

* * *

The results?  Nearly every machine on the network failed at least one Y2K compliance test!   These included BIOS failures, incorrect operating system settings/versions, and known software problems.   In fact, we demonstrated that the firm would have serious difficulties in the next century . . . and outlined a remediation plan that will address these problems.  We also left them with a custom-burned CD that contained all the patches and Y2K updates that they would need to make their environment fully Year 2000 ready.