News Briefs and Product Shorts

• PeopleSoft claimed it has exceeded its goals for the integration of J.D. Edwards' applications into its enterprise software collection. The ERP software vendor, which acquired J.D. Edwards and its large OS/400 installed base last summer, announced in December the availability of seven "pre-integrations" and four enterprise performance management solutions allowed it to surpass the product roadmap it announced to the world in September. The seven integration offerings link various components of PeopleSoft's flagship Enterprise ERP suite with the PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne suite, which was formerly called OneWorld, in areas such as order capture, procurement, supply chain, and general ledger. The new performance management offerings, meanwhile, allow data from PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne and PeopleSoft World (formerly WorldSoftware) ERP suites to be loaded into the PeopleSoft Enterprise Warehouse product, and displayed in Global Consolidations, Manufacturing Scorecard, Supplier Rating System, and Enterprise Scorecard business intelligence offerings. PeopleSoft says these offerings, which shipped December 17, underscores its commitment to J.D. Edwards users. The Pleasanton, California, company has taken some heat from WorldSoftware users for what they perceive as a lack of new development planned for the application.
  
  

• European retailers and dealers buying clothing from The North Face this winter will be benefiting from new Web software from Geac that gives them greater visibility into the availability and pricing of the clothes maker's products. The Web site, www.thenorthfaceeurope.com, lets customers view pictures and specifications for thousands of different products and place their orders online, at any time. If an item is out of stock, the software recommends an alternative or "best match" substitute, a feature that Geac says helps The North Face realize the full potential of an order. The Web site was designed and implemented by RunTime, a Geac subsidiary that focuses on clothes and shoes, and uses a Microsoft Windows-based CRM package called SellIT e-com, which links directly into The North Face's System21 ERP system running on an iSeries server at the manufacturer's data center in the United States. The new Web site went live in October after three months of work and offers similar capabilities that the company already offered its American retailers and dealers.
  
  
• Bytware announced that its StandGuard Anti-Virus and Network Security software packages have been granted the ServerProven certification by IBM. The certification provides a higher level of assurance that the software works as advertised on the OS/400 platform, and it also paves the way for potential discounts on IBM hardware. StandGuard Anti-Virus, which Bytware launched to great fanfare last summer, uses the McAfee virus-scanning engine developed by security software leader Network Associates in order to look for and eliminate Windows-type viruses that can be stored in OS/400's Integrated File System (IFS). While OS/400 itself cannot be infected by these viruses, the IFS can store viruses and propagate them to attached Windows machines, thereby unknowingly worsening of the problem of viruses in OS/400 shops. StandGuard Anti-Virus is still the only anti-virus software that runs natively on OS/400.
  
  
• Brooks Internet Software has announced a new release of INTELLIscribe, a TCP/IP-based print utility that provides LPR/LPD connectivity from Windows clients to hosts, including OS/400 servers. With INTELLIscribe Version 3.1, Brooks has made several changes, including the addition of support for printers advertised by the Service Location Protocol (SLP), faster print speeds, and improvements to the user interface in the areas of reprints. INTELLIscribe runs on most Windows operating systems and costs $69 per client for commercial operations and $57 per client for government and educational institutions.
  
  
• The Royal Caribbean cruise line says it will save $300,000 by switching to IBM Shark disk arrays for its data warehouse, which runs on iSeries and pSeries servers. Royal Caribbean used to have three storage suppliers, but company officials say that arrangement was an obstacle to efficiency and storage growth, which is close to 40 percent per year. "We knew we could make our data center operations more efficient and cost-effective by consolidating our environment on IBM storage and servers," said Gregory Martin, a technology manager with Royal Caribbean. So the cruise ship operator kicked out the other storage vendors and replaced them with a single IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server Model 800, which scales well into the terabyte range. Today the ESS Model 800 "Shark" supports the company's data warehouse, which runs across three iSeries servers (an 890, an 830, and an 820) and two pSeries Unix servers, (a 650 and a 630). IBM Global Services also helped Royal Caribbean to deploy IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for back-ups and archives.
  
  
• Create!form International recently launched a new version of its Create!stream software, which hooks into components of Create!form's electronic document distribution suite to let customers output their OS/400 spool files by any combination of e-mail, fax, print, archives, or the Web. A new user interface in Create!stream Version 3.0 will make it easier to configure document handling and distribution instructions, the company says, while the improved processing speed will improve efficiency. Other improvements include centralized administration of delivery templates and template mapping from within the Create!stream interface for faster routing configuration and management, the company says. Create!stream runs on Windows NT, 2000, or 2003 servers and connects to a variety of hosts, including OS/400, Windows, Unix, and VMS servers. The Waltham, Massachusetts, company, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Bottomline Technologies, is selling licenses for Create!stream 3.0 for $2,495.