Recognizing the importance of user directories established on iSeries servers and mainframes, Trustgenix and IdentityForge unveiled a partnership last week that will allow organizations to leverage that user data for wider single sign-on (SSO) implementations. The companies plan to do this by integrating their respective products, including TrustGenix IdentityBridge and IdentityForge’s LDAP Gateway, by the fourth quarter.

Trustgenix’s flagship product, IdentityBridge, is a federated identity management system that essentially lashes together the various other identity management systems that may be used in a company or by a company’s partners, thereby eliminating the need for users to remember different passwords and

IBM filled out its Workplace portal strategy last week when it released Workplace Designer version 2.5, a new script development environment for creating composite applications that run on the recently released Workplace Collaboration Services and Workplace Services Express portals. With support for iSeries and other platforms, Workplace Designer is a key component of IBM’s Workplace strategy to combat Microsoft‘s Exchange juggernaut, while providing a Java-centric roadmap for Domino programmers.

You can take your pick of studies that show IBM losing market share to Microsoft in the e-mail server and collaboration marketplace–IDC and Gartner have recently come out with

iSeries shops looking for a graphical cross reference tool might want to take a look at DSP400i from CabledSoft. The tool, which was released earlier this year by Swedish developer Mikael Asplund, provides a different view on OS/400 file and object relationship than your typical greenscreen cross reference tool, and may be considerably more affordable, as well.

There are many uses for cross reference tools in today’s modern OS/400 shop. When a programmer leaves an organization and takes with him all the institutional knowledge of how an undocumented application works, a cross reference tool can be a lifesaver. Similarly,

DataMystic has a new release of TextPipe, a Windows utility that lets users do all sorts of things to text files, including cleaning data in preparation for a data warehousing project and translating between ASCI and the EBCDIC formats. Version 7.5 bolsters the product’s OS/400 and mainframe story by bringing new report conversion capabilities through its “mainframe copybook wizard,” and expands its foreign language translation support.

DataMystic is a software vendor based in Melbourne, Australia, that has been developing the TextPipe product since the company was founded 15 years ago. The company, which changed its name from Crystal Software earlier