J.D. Edwards shops cringing at the thought of writing 22 percent maintenance checks to Oracle can rest a little easier knowing there are other options, and the ranks of companies offering third-party maintenance programs for World and EnterpriseOne are growing quickly. Two weeks ago, yet another Denver, Colorado, company threw its hat into the third-party maintenance ring, joining three others that have done the same since December.

The latest company to announce third-party maintenance service for J.D. Edwards shops is Conexus Partners, a startup founded by two former executives in J.D. Edwards’ support organization that is located about one

The Drummond Group last week announced results of its first round of certification testing for products using Applicability Statement 3, a new communications standard that uses FTP/S to send EDI transactions over the Internet. Twelve AS3 products from 11 companies made Drummond’s cut, enabling companies to begin using the AS3 protocol, which some say offers greater security than the HTTP/S-based AS2 protocol.

While the first draft specification for AS3 was submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force quite recently, in 2003, some communications products already included support for AS3. However, it wasn’t until last week that any AS3 product was

Last week inFORM Decisions introduced a new release of its iDocs suite that allows OS/400 shops to use any Windows-based graphic design tool to create electronic forms. People who are skilled with front-end programs like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word can now use the iMap component in iDocs 4.0 to quickly create professional looking forms or reports from iSeries spool data.

The iDocs is a modular suite of document management tools that enable OS/400 shops to replace their pre-printed forms and checks with electronic documents, which saves money and adds flexible distribution options. The iDocs suite uses Printer Control Language

Linoma Software launched an updated release of its iSeries middleware last week that renders better-looking screens. The new release of aXes, a Web-enablement product that dynamically converts OS/400 green screens into browser-based GUIs that don’t require interactive processing, now makes better-looking GUIs. Other new features include the capability to view OS/400 spool files and access the DB2/400 database through the browser, and an OS/400 implementation of the Lua scripting language.

Aterial XML eBusiness Server, or aXes, which was developed by Linoma’s Australian partner, Arterial Software, is an interesting product that hits two birds with one stone. By capturing 5250