Re: Switching alarm system - can I convert my database?

There is no EULA that would stop you from keeping your own data.
Do you know what database engine your new system as well as your old system
uses? Hopefully it is not Borland, the king of data corruption in my
opinion. Even without using the data front end of the access application
itself, the data tables can generally be accessed. However, sometimes the
alarm points are dealt with by a third party add on software overlay.
You have not mentioned any badging yet so I don't know if that is a concern
too. If you wish to save yourself the time and trouble of repunching all the
data, you will have to create a table from the data in the old system that
matches the table format the new system uses. Generally those tables have to
match exactly in all aspects (text and text length, dates and date formats,
on and on). If you have not used been trained on databases this can be a
tough assignment. If you mention the brand of the old and new systems the
techniques for doing it could be more easily explained.

"Pat Coghlan" <news@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:468507fb$0$14502$c3e8da3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tommy wrote:
Pat Coghlan <news@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:00d044b6$0$28079$c3e8da3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
We are upgrading our commercial alarm & access control system to one
sold by another vendor. Our current system has a database consisting
of our cardholders, alarm point descriptions, instructions etc. which
we'd like to "mine" and copy to our new system.

The software licence seems to restrict us from doing anything but
operate our current system. Does anyone know of a situation where
this type of data mining has resulted in litigation over infringement
of a software licence?


Without knowing any specifics, all we can give is general advice. Does
your current software have have any export functions? if you can export
to excel or to a text file you might be able to cut and paste some of
your information. Does your new software have a conversion utility? you
are probably still looking at some manual entry. No pain no gain

There is an export function for cardholders only, but we have lots of
other data (alarm point descriptions etc. - thousands of them) that could
be moved over.

Doing the conversion is not the problem. I'm wondering if it can be done
in a way to avoid infringing the EULA - which seems to preclude this type
of data mining.


.

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