OS/400 shops preparing for Sarbanes-Oxley Act audits can find some help in a new release of PowerLock SecurityAudit unveiled by The PowerTech Group last week. With SecurityAudit 2.0, PowerTech is including a new AuditAdvisor function that encapsulates the knowledge of the company’s OS/400 security experts, as well as COBIT and ISO standards, and helps generate the required SOX reports. The company is also making it easier to configure security on multiple iSeries with new releases of its NetworkSecurity and CentralAdmin products.

One of the most common complaints that companies have voiced about SOX compliance over the past three years is

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why are your top business analysts ruining their eyes reading line-for-line the reams of reports output from your ERP system? That’s the question New Generation Software wants you to ask, especially since it unveiled its Business Performance Dashboard software earlier this year. This month NGS is shipping a new Starter Pack of templates designed to get users up and running quickly with graphical reports based on iSeries data.

The Business Performance Dashboard, which NGS launched earlier this year, enables business analysts and corporate executives to get a handle on the

OS/400 shops looking to save a little money in the printing department may want to check out a new product called Multi-Host Print (MHP) that was unveiled by Hewlett-Packard business partner Capella Technologies last month. MHP is a printer-resident memory module that converts IPDS and SCS datastreams into a format compatible with HP LaserJet printers. The MHP module also includes a forms overlay component for sprucing up SCS reports with graphics.

Capella’s new MHP product includes two components, both of which are contained in a single CompactFlash memory module that plugs into HP’s line of LaserJet laser and multi-function printers

There are many similarities between IBM‘s iSeries and zSeries servers. Both are built on proprietary architectures, both are renown for their excellent reliability and security, and both have very committed user bases. In fact, a good number of the 20,000 or so mainframe shops in the world are also OS/400 shops. To keep these customers happy, IBM is introducing new Tivoli Omegamon and Rational-branded utilities to enable the testing of new workloads and the monitoring of production systems on iSeries and distributed platforms from the big daddy of servers: the mainframe.

Several weeks ago during the SHARE mainframe conference