ProCARE has been rather fortunate in the lead-up to the year 2000. Most of the problems associated with 2 digit year designation (as in DD/MM/YY ) were encountered and resolved twelve years ago in the form of the Y1K bug.In 1988, there were large numbers of Residents who were born in the previous century. In order to calculate current age from DOB v. current date and notify the occurrence of birthdays, ProCARE used an internal perpetual calendar which is valid until 31 December 9999. This calendar is now also used in Wages (for automatic wage period progression), Board accounts and all other functions which involve date calculation. The transition of a date calculation across a millenium boundary is actually a non-event. For any given date for the next 800 years, the ProCARE calendar can tell you what day of the week it will be, whether it will be a leap year and how many days from now until then.
Having said that, there is a difference between looking backwards and forwards from within a given century (in this case 19xx) and performing the same functions when physically relocated to a different century. There have to be questions asked of the low level functions of the programming language. There can be complications such as a file which was created in one century is inaccessible in the next. There have been no problems with ProCARE in this respect. A test machine running ProCARE in all its aspects passed through the transition and is now well on the way into the year 2000 without any operational side effects whatsoever.
The Bank Transfer modules for some Banks are not converted to 4 digit year. Whether this represents a Y2K issue or not depends on individual Banks. ProCARE was converted to full 4 digit year for all modules late in 1998 but this had to be reversed in a hurry as some Bank software failed to interpret the dates correctly. We will take advice from the individual Banks concerning the timing of any format changes.
There are some issues with some early Windows platforms. (Win 3.xx and early Win 95) The available literature suggests that the '95 issues will be invisible to ProCARE.
The last issue is the computer hardware. A computer may have been turned off for an hour or a month - your programs can have no idea. ProCARE is dependent on the computer to accurately report the date on power-up. This pinpoints the current spot on the internal calendar. If the computer is not Y2K compliant and it was to report the date as 1 Jan 1900, ProCARE will accept that.. Your first clue might be a computer printed cheque with the wrong calendar date on it, or Residents in the -20 to -30 age group. No damage will be done provided the situation is rectified prior to any major processing. If a computer reports the date as 29 Feb 2000, there will be a major conflict as the ProCARE internal calendar will insist that there is no such date.
There has been no indication that ProCARE will fail the Y2K challenge in any respect provided that it is resident in a Y2K compliant environment.
All been and gone with little or no fanfare - this is how it was in 1999.
HomePage