• Kronos Tackles Unscheduled Absenteeism with Labor Software

  November 1, 2005 Alex Woodie

  Here are some sobering statistics: On any given day, nearly one in 10 employees is unexpectedly absent from work, and over a year, this lost productivity costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee. Getting a better handle on the affects of unscheduled absenteeism was one of the hot topics at this year’s KronosWorks, the annual user conference that OS/400 labor management software developer Kronos held last month in Las Vegas, a town that’s no stranger to lost wages or unscheduled absenteeism. It should come as no surprise that people continue to make up the bulk of organizations’ operating costs. This is

  …

  Read more

• Informatica Aims to Virtualize Data with PowerCenter 8

  November 1, 2005 Alex Woodie

  There has been a lot of talk lately about virtualizing hardware and running multiple operating system images on the same machine to make it easier to manage applications. Informatica is now applying that general idea to data transformations with a new version of its flagship PowerCenter product unveiled this week. With PowerCenter 8, the company is looking to break down the barriers to building pipelines that connect physical repositories of data and applications accessing the data. Informatica’s PowerCenter product began life as an extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tool for building data warehouses from data stored in the transactional systems

  …

  Read more

• AVR Provides a Better Alternative Than Screen Scraping, ASNA Says

  November 1, 2005 Alex Woodie

  There are a plethora of options available to OS/400 shops looking to modernize or migrate their monolithic RPG applications using a service oriented architecture. One of the quickest and easiest ways is to implement a screen scraper that outputs the 5250 datastream as a Web service. ASNA says it has a better way with its ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) for .NET offering. Last week the company unveiled AVR for .NET version 7.2, which adds support for more RPG functions, as well as expanded printing capabilities. In a new white paper titled, “Screen Scraping: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” posted on

  …

  Read more

• Cyberscience Unveils Reporting Tool for iSeries Apps

  November 1, 2005 Alex Woodie

  OS/400 shops looking for an alternative to Query/400 and other third-party reporting tools may want to take a look at Enterprise Cyberquery (eCQ) from Cyberscience. Last week Cyberscience announced that eCQ now provides out-of-the-box support for a range of OS/400-based ERP applications from SSA Global, including BPCS and PRMS, and the company is looking to further its reach into the operating system and the community. When you think of ad hoc query and reporting tools, chances are Cyberscience isn’t one of the first software vendors to pop into your mind. While the 28-year-old software company has sold eCQ

  …

  Read more

• iTera Says Out-of-Synch Conditions are a Thing of the Past

  October 25, 2005 Alex Woodie

  Perhaps the biggest challenge of maintaining an OS/400 high availability implementation is dealing with out-of-synch conditions. When a file or an object on the backup system doesn’t match up with the corresponding file or object on the primary system, an OS/400 shop risks losing data when a failover is performed. iTera says it has created new technology with the latest release of its Echo2 high availability software that makes worrying about such conditions a thing of the past. Last week, iTera unveiled Echo2 version 4.2, which the company started selling October 1. This release contains several “autonomic” functions, which is

  …

  Read more

• Raz-Lee Developing Native iSeries Antivirus Software

  October 25, 2005 Alex Woodie

  iSeries shops will have another option when it comes to obtaining native OS/400 anti-virus software next month when Raz-Lee Security is expected to ship iSecurity Anti-Virus. The new software, which is currently undergoing beta tests, is designed to prevent the iSeries’ Integrated File System (IFS)–and the Windows clients accessing the IFS–from becoming infected with viruses, Trojan horses, and other types of malicious code. There’s a common misperception in the OS/400 community that the iSeries is immune to viruses. In fact, security professionals for the platform prefer to say that the iSeries is virus “resistant,” which reflects the fact that, while

  …

  Read more

• The Real World, Versus Real-World Load Testing

  October 25, 2005 Robert Gast

  We universally accept the fact that it’s dangerous to run with sharp objects like scissors. People do nevertheless, and occasionally get hurt. And while it’s risky to go live with newly written software before knowing how it will behave under heavy loads, lots of development shops take the chance. Ironically, load testing is most often left to customers, dealers, salesmen, and others who, for reasons of transacting routine business, interact with skittish new systems at their own peril. Such was the case for a small 100-year-old scissor maker that had based a century of success on quality and accountability. Two

  …

  Read more

• For LANSA, 3-Way Product Data Synch is as Easy as ABI EC

  October 25, 2005 Alex Woodie

  Following the lead of the consumer packaged goods industry’s UCCnet initiative, the Alcohol Beverage Industry’s Electronic Commerce Council (ABI EC) is now pushing for its members to adopt product data synchronization to drive greater efficiency in this supply chain. While this industry poses unique challenges for product data synchronization, progress is being made, particularly at Glazer’s Wholesale Drug, a Texas distributor that implemented LANSA‘s Data Sync Direct product on an OS/400 server, and became one of the first companies to comply with ABI’s request. The rationale behind efforts to standardize and synchronize data about consumer packaged goods is well

  …

  Read more

• SEA and RevSoft End Partnership for OS/400 Utilities

  October 18, 2005 Alex Woodie

  Software Engineering of America is developing its own OS/400 systems management tools following a falling-out with its former development partner, RevSoft. SEA, which has been developing and selling mainframe tools for over 20 years, partnered with the established Australian firm for OS/400 tools in 2004, but disagreements between the two companies led to a mutual decision to call it quits, officials with the companies say. It’s been barely a year since SEA began actively selling and marketing the REV Suite, a collection of nine utilities providing various management and automation functions for iSeries servers, including REV View, REV Backup,

  …

  Read more

• BCD Aims to Streamline Report Writing with Clover

  October 18, 2005 Alex Woodie

  Business Computer Design Int’l is developing new business intelligence software that it says will enable managers and power users to quickly and easily generate a variety of reports from iSeries data, without involving programmers. The new product, called Clover, is based on BCD’s popular Web application development and runtime software, and is slated for availability early next year. There’s a powerful temptation for developers of programming tools to build the applications most commonly developed using their tools, and to sell it to customers as a shrink-wrapped product. It’s a fairly typical occurrence in the OS/400 software market, and not a

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles