For two years, Great Plains Communications had trouble managing its OS/400 high availability environment. Problems such as chronic out-of-synch conditions, difficulty replicating IFS and spool files, and inaccurate system monitor displays prevented the small Nebraska telecommunications company from practicing roll-swaps and thereby gaining confidence in its high availability setup. When the company finally replaced the software with startup iTera‘s Echo2 product, it found a few rough edges, but overall things improved dramatically.

Great Plains Communications is based in the eastern Nebraska city of Blair, on the banks of the Missouri River. The third-generation family owned company has grown over

Metafile, the Rochester, Minnesota, developer of content management and imaging software for OS/400 and other platforms, this month launched a new portlet application for IBM‘s WebSphere Portal Server software. Metafile’s MF.net Portlet for IBM WebSphere software provides another way for users to access the MetaViewer Enterprise electronic report management system from Web portals hosted on the WebSphere software.

MetaViewer Enterprise is a Windows-based enterprise report management (ERM) and computer output to laserdisc (COLD) suite, designed to capture, organize, and redistribute output from applications running on OS/400, mainframe, Unix, Windows, and Linux servers, although most of Metafile’s 600 customers

The Internet is a phenomenal medium, but as we all know, it is also inherently insecure. If you send sensitive information over the public electronic byways, and you don’t somehow encrypt it, you’re asking for trouble. Linoma Software addresses this need with Transfer Anywhere, a data transformation utility that provides a Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption implementation on OS/400 and Windows operating systems. This month Linoma shipped a new release that has new security automation capabilities.

Transfer Anywhere is a versatile Java program that can do the job of several point products, including distributing, retrieving, converting, compressing, encrypting, and signing

Two of the many product news bits hidden away in IBM‘s eServer i5 announcement on May 4 were the upcoming releases of DB2 Content Manager for iSeries and DB2 Content Manager OnDemand for iSeries. Those releases, which shipped June 11, expand the ways in which users can interact with unstructured data, such as e-mails and scanned documents. IBM is also cooking up new “express” editions of the DB2 Content Manager that will run on OS/400 and Linux.

DB2 Content Manager is IBM’s “best of breed” document imaging and workflow solution. No matter what platform it’s deployed on, the role