Industrial Strength Software Company has designed all of our products to be Year-2000 compliant. This document explains some of the technical details of how this was accomplished.

• Dates Stored In Database Files

  Our first product was SourceMaster, a source code version control and archival tool for the AS/400 platform. ISS designed SourceMaster from the very beginning (in 1989) to be capable of handling dates well into the future. All dates stored internally in SourceMaster database files are always stored as a 4 digit year field, followed by a 2 digit month field and a 2 digit day field ("YYYYMMDD"). This design ensures that SourceMaster is capable of handling dates up through the year 9999. ISS actively marketed SourceMaster from 1990 through 1992, and it is still used by several of our original customers.

  In 1991, ISS began developing ChangeMaster , our next-generation change management and version control tool for the AS/400 marketplace. ISS built ChangeMaster upon the original SourceMaster code base. ChangeMaster contains many additional features not found in SourceMaster. Due to this heritage, ChangeMaster is also designed to handle dates well into the future.

• Dates Used As Input Parameters

  All ChangeMaster commands that accept dates as input fields use the built-in date formatting capabilities that are a part of all OS/400 commands, and the date format is then immediately converted into a "YYYYMMDD" format (as described above). Hence, all ChangeMaster code internally uses a single format for all dates.

• Summary

  Industrial Strength Software Company recognized in 1989 that we did not want to have to perform Year 2000 Conversions for all of our products in less than 12 years. Therefore, ISS designed all of our products, from the beginning, to be capable of dealing with dates in the next century without problems. This approach has the added benefit that our customers do not have to install upgrades or new releases of our software for Year 2000 compliance.