September 2005 Volume 9, Number 2

TurnOver Simplifies Dynamic Intranet Application Development at LifeCare

By Antonio Abdo, LANSA® Infrastructure Architect, and Jim Rogers, Vice President, Technical Infrastructure, LifeCare Assurance Company

LifeCare Assurance Company (LifeCare), located in Woodland Hills, California, administers long-term care insurance (LTCI) policies for major insurer companies nationwide. We perform underwriting, issue policies, and process claims, and provide policyholder service, marketing support, and many other functions at our Woodland Hills facility. Currently, LifeCare has approximately 250 employees.

To service LifeCare's client companies, our MIS team developed a dynamically-built intranet. The intranet loads Visual LANSA and object-oriented components, including forms and reusable parts, from a database repository located on the iSeries. We maintain LTCI rules and conditions through the iSeries database, without needing to hardcode new application forms for each state and generic standard, for which we receive changes on a daily basis.

Several of our client companies rely on LifeCare Assurance to host their Websites, which also adhere to LTCI standards. Therefore, we incorporated BEA WebLogic and several NT platforms/servers to give new clients immediate access to customer service information. We had to secure access to that information according to strict HIPAA guidelines. By using the iSeries as the main repository, we can secure the data using the FTP/PGP encryption process to prevent theft of information or unauthorized access.

LifeCare's IBM 810 LPAR iSeries has enough juice to handle three partitions (DEV, QUA, PRD) and house more than one terabyte of images from our Gauss - DocManager application. The dual CPU iSeries has more than enough capacity to host our LANSA intranet applications with great ease.

Our highly automated operations require the latest computing technology. Our old change management system could not link our 5250 legacy programs and database to our new Visual LANSA development. We needed to find a new change management product that could handle GUI, DLL, ASP, and EXE files. It would have been a nightmare for our MIS and QA team members if they'd have had to use two separate processes to move objects into another partition.

We researched available change management solutions, attended several conferences, and observed demos. By a stroke of luck, we found SoftLanding up in New England, far away from us in sunny California. We quickly realized that SoftLanding's TurnOver did exactly what we needed. All our MIS and QA team members could easily and productively use the same change management application. With LanTurn, the TurnOver/LANSA interface, LANSA definitions are checked out from a production partition into a development partition, changed, and promoted the same way TurnOver manages other iSeries source and objects.

When it came to implementing TurnOver, we knew that the first, most important step was initial setup. We told TurnOver where our libraries, files, fields, cross references, and components resided (libl, path, authority, etc.), and the rest was easy. True, there are always challenges with any new implementation, but we can now promote any type of object, from any environment and from any server (including the iSeries), without the limitations that we faced daily using the former vendor's product. The robust, integrated software change management system supports our IT mission to implement the best technology to help LifeCare maintain its leadership position in the competitive LTCI marketplace.

LANSA is a trade name and registered trademark of LANSA.

Back to Table of Contents

WHAT'S NEW