Archiving an entire system

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Russell Spreeman
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    Our organization was acquired by a much larger company which is moving us onto their systems. We are on Lawson applications v9.0.1 with HR Suite, Financials, and Procurement / Inventory / MSCM. The new company has their own Lawson system onto which we will be moving, we are expecting to move to their accounting system, and we have already moved onto their HR system. Our existing Lawson system is remotely hosted.

    What can we do to retain meaningful access to our data for historical retention requirements, auditing, and such things? Just saving the tables is not much of a help because so much of the data is relational, making it complicated at best and impossible at worst to generate information that might be requested. If we were hosted 'in-house' we could just keep the server around and fire it up for any future needs, but we don't have the server. There would be no need for support or upgrades, just the ability to access the data which would be much better via Lawson's reports and screens than a plethora of tables.

    I spoke with one vendor whose 'solution' allows some amount of more convenient access but he was talking in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Has anyone been down this road and can share some info? Thanks.

    Brian Allen
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      The main options I can think of would be to keep the relational tables and just build reports, or keep a working environment to be able to access the Lawson data through the forms. It may be worth exploring a limited hosting solution with Infor, Velocity, or other partners to see if an archive could be a less costly option. I would also recommend checking with Rich B. at Dashboard Gear (www.dashboardgear.com) who is one of the best data/reporting exports for Lawson. Rich may have some other ideas. Absolute has an archive solution that may be useful to check into.
      Greg Moeller
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        You could keep a separate product line in your existing system and do a product line copy as outlined in the admin manual. This however would probably necessitate the need for upgrades... unless you keep it in a separate environment as @Brian suggests.
        Brian Allen
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          Yes, if they have a Lawson environment, an archive product line of your data is a good approach. Revere and Absolute have solutions that can take just current data to as far back as you would like to go.
          Russell Spreeman
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            Unfortunately it looks very much as though we won't have a Lawson environment that we could keep data on, unless we were to somehow build a server to just keep parked and use as necessary (or a virtualized one which would be better). I am not sure if we OWN the software and can keep it on a system - certainly without ongoing support - or if we cannot even have the software installed without paying for the privilege, if we kept it on an archival system. There would be no need for upgrades or anything, it would just be sitting until when/if we needed something from it, which I fully expect would happen. The cost of an aftermarket system that I was quoted by one vendor made me wonder if having a virtualized system created might not be cheaper and better as well.
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