Legacy Application Support

Keeping what works running

Rewriting a working system is expensive and risky. Often the better answer is proper support: patching, monitoring, and consultants who are willing to work in the technology you actually have, not just the technology that’s fashionable now.

Most of the systems we’re asked to look after have the same story behind them. They were built by someone who understood the business inside out, they ran that business well for fifteen or twenty years, and then that person retired, or the software house closed, or the vendor was acquired and the product quietly discontinued. The system still works. There’s just nobody left to call.

Microsoft Access applications

Access is still quietly running order books, job costing, membership records and stock control in a lot of businesses — often with more logic inside it than anyone realises. We take these on as they are:

• Fixing broken queries, forms, reports and VBA, including code nobody has documented
• Repairing and recovering corrupted or bloated .mdb and .accdb files, then stopping it happening again
• Untangling multi-user file-share setups that lock up or corrupt under load
• Splitting front end from back end properly, and moving the data to SQL Server while the Access front end carries on working exactly as your team expects
• Getting old databases running again on current Windows and current Office, including the 32-bit and 64-bit driver problems that usually cause that migration to stall
• Replacing a retired Access Runtime or ODBC dependency without your users noticing

Excel systems that became business-critical

There is a particular kind of workbook that started as someone’s calculation and ended up running a department: forty tabs, hundreds of formulas, a macro nobody wants to open, and an unwritten rule about who is allowed to touch it. It’s fragile, but it also encodes years of real business knowledge, so throwing it away loses more than it saves.

• Auditing what the workbook actually does, and writing it down properly
• Fixing and maintaining VBA macros, including workbooks whose author is long gone
• Removing the breakages — broken links, hard-coded paths, silent circular references, values that were formulas last year
• Adding validation and protection so a mistyped cell can’t quietly produce a wrong invoice
• Getting concurrent users out of one shared file and onto something they can all work in at once
• When the workbook has clearly outgrown itself, lifting it into a proper application or BackOffice system — in stages, with the spreadsheet still available while people get comfortable

FoxPro, dBase and the DOS-era database tools

Visual FoxPro went out of support in 2015 and there was never a successor. FoxPro 2.6, dBase, Clipper and Paradox systems are older still, and yet a surprising number of them are still producing invoices and stock reports every day. We support them:

• Keeping VFP and FoxPro 2.6 applications running on modern Windows and Windows Server, including the printing, path-length and file-locking problems that show up after an OS upgrade
• Reading, repairing and reindexing .dbf, .cdx and .fpt files when tables go bad
• Working with the original source where it exists, and recovering or rebuilding the build environment where it doesn’t
• Getting data out into SQL Server or PostgreSQL — cleanly, with the field-type and encoding quirks handled — so reporting can move on even if the application doesn’t
• Terminal server and Citrix setups that let a DOS-era application be used safely from anywhere

Software the vendor no longer supports

Sometimes the problem isn’t your code at all. It’s a packaged product that’s end of life, out of support, or from a company that no longer exists — a bespoke system from a closed software house, an ERP or practice-management product three versions behind, or something where support now means an upgrade quote you can’t justify this year.

• Taking on day-to-day support and troubleshooting where there’s no vendor left to escalate to
• Keeping the application alive on supported operating systems, databases and hardware
• Working out the database and file formats so you can get your own data out on demand
• Building integrations around a product with no API, using its database, files or exports — see Integration Pipes
• An honest read on how much longer it’s viable, and what replacing it would realistically involve
• Isolating it safely when it can’t be patched, so an unsupported system isn’t also an open door

We also work in VB6 and VBA, Delphi, classic ASP, older .NET Framework, Crystal Reports and legacy SQL Server versions. If your system sits at the edges of that list, ask.

Where there’s no source, no documentation and nobody to ask

This is the situation we get called into most often, and the one businesses assume is hopeless. It usually isn’t.

We start with a survey: what the system does, what it runs on, what it connects to, where the data actually lives, and which parts of it the business genuinely depends on. From there we recover what can be recovered — source, build environments, database schemas, the logic buried in macros and stored procedures — and write down what was only ever in someone’s head. You end up with documentation you own, and a system that’s no longer a single point of failure.

Hosting for applications that can’t move

A lot of legacy systems aren’t struggling because of their code. They’re struggling because the machine underneath them is dying, the hosting provider is closing the account, or nobody will take responsibility for a server running an operating system that went out of support years ago. We will host it.

• Lifting an application off failing physical hardware — including the tower under someone’s desk — into a virtual machine that gets backed up, monitored and patched
• Running the old operating system it genuinely needs, network-isolated so an unsupported platform isn’t an open door into the rest of your business
• Taking over from a provider that’s shutting down, a developer who’s retiring, or a data centre contract you’d rather not renew
• Windows Server, Linux, 32-bit runtimes, ancient database engines and the ODBC and file-share arrangements these applications expect to find
• Terminal server, Remote Desktop and Citrix so a desktop-era or DOS-era application can be used from anywhere, including by people working from home
• Access and FoxPro back-ends moved off a creaking office file share onto hosted storage that doesn’t corrupt under concurrent use
• Modern TLS, VPN and firewalling put in front of an application that can only speak old protocols, so the exposed edge is current even when the application isn’t
• Licence and activation problems that surface the moment old software is moved to new hardware

It runs on the same platform, the same NOC and the same per-machine pricing as Supportive Hosting — the difference is that we’ll accept workloads a mainstream host won’t, and we’ll support what’s inside the machine as well as the machine itself.

Old websites, kept online

Websites age out too, and usually the trigger is someone else’s decision: the agency that built it has closed, the hosting is being discontinued, or a PHP or .NET version is being switched off and the site won’t start on the next one.

• Taking over hosting for sites built on classic ASP, older PHP, older .NET Framework, ColdFusion, WordPress versions long past updating, or a static site nobody has the source for
• Recovering a site from a live server or a backup when the original files are gone
• Adding HTTPS to a site that never had it, and fixing the mixed-content and hard-coded insecure links that break when you do
• Keeping every URL exactly as it was, so the search rankings and inbound links the site has built up over the years survive the move
• Getting contact forms and mail working again after a move — these break first, and silently
• Locking down an un-updatable CMS, or converting it to a static archive that can’t be exploited but still looks and reads the same
• Domain, DNS and certificate renewals handled so the site doesn’t go dark because a renewal notice went to an old mailbox

Keeping it running properly, not just alive

Support is the boring part, and it’s the part that makes the difference:

• Monitoring and scheduled backups that are actually tested by restoring them
• Patching of the platform around it — operating system, database, network — with a rollback path
• Bug fixes and small enhancements that don’t destabilise the wider system
• A named consultant who knows your setup, rather than a queue
• Reporting built alongside it, so old data still answers current questions — see Data & Analytics

Modernising, when it’s actually the right call

We don’t lead with a rewrite, because a big-bang replacement of a system nobody fully understands is how businesses lose years. When modernisation is the right answer, we do it in stages: move the data to a supported database first, put an integration layer around it, then replace functional areas one at a time while the old system keeps running. Each step stands on its own and can be stopped without leaving you halfway to nowhere.

Sometimes the assessment comes back saying the honest answer is to leave it alone and support it properly for another five years. We’ll tell you that too.

What we need from you

• Access to the system, and whoever knows most about how it’s used day to day
• Whatever exists — source code, installers, licence keys, old handover notes, the original developer’s name
• Which parts of it the business genuinely cannot lose
• Any deadline forcing the issue: an OS upgrade, an audit, a hardware failure, a retirement

Who this is for

Businesses running something critical on technology their original vendor or developer no longer supports — and anyone who’s been told their system is too old, too undocumented or too unusual for someone else to take on.