Case Study: Minnesota State Colleges and Universities achieves reliable, scalable mission-critical applications with Uniface

Provider of Higher Education Keeps Pace with Technology over the Years with Uniface

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU), the largest higher‑education system in Minnesota with 31 institutions across 54 campuses serving about 250,000 students, faced a complex, mission‑critical IT environment. Their landscape included Uniface applications on OpenVMS, COBOL batch processing, Java web apps and an Oracle database supporting over 2,000 Uniface components and 1,400 tables. The challenge was to maintain and modernize legacy platforms, integrate disparate technologies, preserve performance and scale, and manage knowledge transfer as staff retired.

MnSCU used Uniface’s technology‑independent, model‑driven platform and multiple integration techniques (including RESTful web services, COBOL integration, OpenVMS DCL hooks and web‑enabling green‑screen functionality) to migrate databases, modernize interfaces and tie together client/server and web tiers. As a result, their mission‑critical applications remain current and reliable, integrated at every tier, web‑enabled where needed, and able to scale to very high user and transaction volumes while continuing to serve staff and students.

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

Dave Willford

Application Development Manager