Re: Converting Documents Formulas to use

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

I heard somewhere that when people were estimating what it would cost
for companies to have their legacy systems reviewed and corrected by
programmers for Y2K problems, they used a dollar per line of code as a
rule of thumb. Seems to me that what you're asking for is at least as
challenging. And in the Y2K case, only a small fraction of lines were
actually touched, as most lines did not deal with date information. In
your case, on the other hand, every line will be touched. So even if
someone argues that the labor you need won't be as expensive as COBOL
programmers, I think you could still use that figure as a starting
point.

Karen Koldyk wrote:
> 
> Hi all - I think this might be slightly off topic but not sure where to go =
> with this so Eric please forgive me if it is.
> 
> My proposal for converting our documentation into XML has gone into =
> management and met with interest. What I'm trying to come up with now is =
> an approximate time frame under 3 different scenarios:
> 
> a) converting manually
> b) using a program written inhouse to replace proprietary codes with XML =
> code on approximately 10% of the documentation
> c) using a service bureau
> 
> The only information I really have is that we have approximately 1,884,356 =
> lines of ebcidec text to convert.