1. Study and understand Esri's criteria for Year 2000 compliance. Identify additional criteria as necessary for your organization. It is important for you to be clear about how your system should behave in order for you to meet your Year 2000 conformance requirements.

2. Investigate all five levels of technology in your systems--hardware, operating systems, databases and files, applications, and custom codes--to ensure Year 2000 compliance.

Hardware

Is your set of platforms ready for Year 2000? Visit your vendors' Web sites for Year 2000. Understand their statements of compliance. Understand the hardware issues and their potential impacts, if any. Identify actions you might need to take to ensure that your Year 2000 compliance criteria are met.

Operating system

Are your operating system(s) Year 2000 compliant? Visit your vendors' Web sites for Year 2000. Understand their statements of compliance. Understand any operating system issues and their potential impacts, if any. Identify actions you might need to take on your operating system to ensure that your Year 2000 compliance criteria are met.

Databases and files

How are dates and years stored in your databases? Are four digits used for specifying years (YYYY versus YY)? Do date entry forms and tools correctly capture four-digit years? If not, what is your plan for dealing with date fields that do not use four-digit years?

Applications

Make a list of the applications at your site. Also, identify the specific releases you are currently using or have specific plans to move to. Visit the Year 2000 Web site for each application and identify the level of Year 2000 compliance for each. When your applications are not compliant, takes steps to remedy this situation. This might include any of the following:

• Install a patch to fix compliance issues.
• Move to a compliant release of the application.

Custom code

Make a list of custom applications. For each, contact the developer to identify any specific date handling or special date/year fields in attribute tables. Ensure that four-digit years are used and that any logic in custom code for date and year handling supports dates after December 31, 1999. You can search for special strings such as "19", "DATE =," or "YEAR=".

3. Check your license files. If you use ArcInfo or ArcView GIS on UNIX and have since the summer of 1996 or longer, you may need to update your keycode files. Keycodes generated before the summer of 1996 have a timeout date at the end of this century. Keycodes generated since then should be okay. Most users will have already updated their keycode files, but please check carefully just to be sure. Look at the expiration date in your license files. If you find the date DEC-31-99, your keycodes will time out on that specific date. There are tools in your installation to repair this. See your installation documentation or visit Esri's Year 2000 Web site for more detail.