tekservePOS launched a new suite of i OS-based software last week at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference and expo in New York City. The new offering, called tekRETAIL Suite, provides a full-function point of sale (POS) platform for stores, at a fraction of the cost of enterprise POS vendors, the company claims.

tekRETAIL Suite has two components: the POS software, called tekRETAIL Store, and tekRETAIL Central Office. tekRETAIL Store runs on Windows, while tekRETAIL Central Office runs on the IBM i OS and IBM Power Systems (formerly i5 and AS/400) servers.

The POS component provides all the basic functionality

When it comes to the make-to-order and engineer-to-order discrete manufacturing industries, there’s a little company from South Carolina that you may not have heard about called Jobscope. With roots that can be traced back to the original “Silverlake” AS/400 program, Jobscope is happy to be off the radar of the major ERP vendors, as it concentrates on helping customers drive more efficiency into their processes.

Like many software companies, Jobscope was born out of need. A manufacturing organization was having difficulty finding an ERP package that could handle its make-to-order (MTO) manufacturing setup, so it decided to write its

This week the Lotus world is tilted on its axis toward Florida, where the annual Lotusphere conference is under way in Orlando. IBM already announced the general availability of LotusLive.com, the software as a service collaboration and communication system previously known in its beta version as “Bluehouse”; a March release of a joint Lotus Notes and SAP Business Suite product called Alloy; and a deal with Research In Motion that brings collaboration features and developer tools on the BlackBerry platform.

LotusLive is a cloud-based suite of social networking and collaboration services designed for business. The big deal with LotusLive

A couple of years ago, when Infor was still figuring out exactly what it owned following a string of acquisitions that made it one of the world’s three largest enterprise software vendors, the company irritated some of its reseller partners by mandating they sell only Infor solutions and drop competing products. Today, as the company refines its reseller model, it says those restrictions are in the past, and is displaying a more nuanced understanding of channel politics.

As senior vice president of global partners, Dennis Michalis is in charge of the diverse group of partners peddling Infor products around the

Halcyon Software unveiled a new version of its Job Scheduler last week that’s designed to drive more automation into management of System i systems. The biggest new feature in Job Scheduler 4.0 is something that Halcyon calls “multiple dependencies,” which enables a System i server and its various jobs to run with higher degrees of autonomy than before. The British software developer also made its first U.S. sale of its systems management tools for Intel-based servers.

Halcyon’s Job Scheduler reduces the need for human intervention in the management of System i servers, and contributes toward the goal of “lights

Protection of valuable data is an important thing for a business. For many companies, it’s one of the main reasons why they chose the System i server in the first place. However, companies that relied on Maximum Availability‘s high availability software to protect their data from disasters and system outages could not take advantage of the new on-disk encryption capabilities that IBM delivered with i 6.1 last year. That changed last week, when MaxAv developed a new release of *noMAX that’s compatible with IBM encryption.

New Zealand-based Maximum Availability has been selling its remote journaling-based high availability products since

Companies can use both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange at the same time when they install Coexistence Manager for Notes, a new product unveiled by Quest Software last week. The software allows companies to use the e-mail and calendaring functions of both products indefinitely.

Quest, the giant Windows utility developer, released Coexistence Manager for Notes last week primarily to help smooth customer transitions from IBM Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft Exchange. The product enables employees to simultaneously use the e-mail, calendars, attachments, and document hyperlink functionality of both messaging systems, and is designed to be used with Quest’s Notes Migrator for

Organizations looking for a way to manage the encryption of data on Google Android may soon be using software developed by Patrick Townsend Security Solutions, a company that has long provided security solutions for the IBM i OS platform, and who is now branching out to the broader computer market.

Last week, Townsend Security announced that its forthcoming Alliance Key Manager offering will support encryption key retrieval from Google’s Android operating system. This will allow Alliance Key Manager, which Townsend Security will sell as an appliance, to act as the gatekeeper for data stored on Android devices.

Townsend Security

The humble PDF is the most popular document file format for archived data, concluded AIIM, an industry group that follows electronic storage technologies. Nine out of 10 respondents to an AIIM survey found that the PDF is emerging as the primary long-term medium, beating out Microsoft Office formats and that old standby, paper.

A recent survey was undertaken by AIIM to find out what methods and technologies organizations are using for long-term storage of documents. AIIM has an extensive history in this market niche–it was founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association, and today is known as the

Ricoh Americas yesterday unveiled the Aficio MP C2030, a new color multifunction printer (MFP) that offers the higher end features found in other Ricoh MFPs, but, at $5,500, not the price, the company says.

The new MP 2030 is built off the same MP C2050/C2550 platform that was released in December 2008. The laser printer can print, scan, copy, and fax, in black and white or color. Its black and white printing speed is 20 pages per minute at 600 dots per inch (DPI), a respectable speed for a workhorse office printer. Yet when called upon, it can also deliver