by John Browne, on Mar 13, 2013 4:16:00 PM
Given that 88 percent of surveyed companies admit they have a "problem" with legacy applications (57 percent rated the problem as serious) if you haven't yet started planning your application migration strategy now's the time.
Or you can just stick your head in the sand and hope for the best.
Given you don't want a mouthful of sand, here's some things you might want to include in your plan. 
At the 30,000 foot level, the main task of planning for your migration is really really understanding the application and all its interactions. It's a lot of "what" and "how" questions and very little "why."
What...
- does the app do?
- data does it create?
- data does it connect to?
- OS does it run on?
- language is it written in?
How...
- many external references?
- many lines of code?
- 3rd party controls/components?
- many of those controls will run on the target?
- does the application fit into the overall business process?
The overall planning process proceeds from a kickoff with all stakeholders through various information gathering steps to a final report and presentation. The end product should provide enough information to green light the project and guide your actual coding efforts. The process maps out like this (click on the image for a larger view):
You don't have to figure out how to plan your application migration project by yourself. After thousands of migration projects we've honed the planning process until it's razor sharp.
And we've taken those years of experience in migrating thousands of apps and put our planning checklist into an ebook so you can get right to work.
You can download the ebook here or click the button below. We hope you'll find it useful. And if you think it's a bit overwhelming to do all this on your own, we completely understand. Give us a shout and we'll help out.
