News Briefs and Product Shorts

Quantum Still on Track to Launch 1.2 TB SDLT Tape Drive This Year

Quantum officials say the company is still on track to ship its SDLT 1200 tape drive later this year, despite reports from an OEM partner that production of its high-end drive has been delayed. "We haven't made any changes to the roadmap," says Steve Verens, Quantum's senior director of product marketing and strategy for storage devices and media. "We're on track to ship the SDLT 1200 during the second half of 2004." The SDLT 1200 will provide 600 GB of native capacity, and 1.2 TB capacity when compressed, making it the first Quantum drive to break the 1 TB barrier. Last year, Sony shipped its first 1 TB drive, the SAIT-1, which adds the write-once, read-many (WORM) capability some shops need to bring their archives into compliance with government mandates. Verens says Quantum will be addressing customers' WORM requirements. "In the archive space, there is a strong need for application-specific archive, intelligent archive. Today, most of them revolve around tape-based process," he says. "We're going to be addressing the basic needs the customer has."

adidas-Salomon Uses Magic to Integrate Web Site, iSeries, HP 3000

Magic Software reports its client, adidas-Salomon Canada, has successfully launched a Web portal that ties together consumer, employee, and business process functionality. The portal, accessible at www.adidas.ca, integrates all B2C, B2B, and business-to-employee (B2E) functionality for the company's three major brands--adidas, Salomon, and TaylorMade--with business process integration occurring between its youth-oriented Web site, its iSeries server, and an Hewlett-Packard 3000 system. Paul Leone, the company's vice president of logistics and IT, says the portal offers eCatalog and SKU-specific store locator, B2B features such as order and shipment tracking and on-the-fly invoice generation, and B2E features such as query-based sales analysis and item master generation. "We have Web-enabled our entire enterprise IT infrastructure with hard cost savings that put our immediate, provable ROI [return on investment] at four-to-one." The savings will amount to $100,000 annually in reduced printing costs for retail catalogs, and $30,000 to $40,000 annually by eliminating shrinkage and lost shipments through "foolproof box-by-box electronic documentation of carton contents," Magic says. The company used Magic's eDeveloper to build the portal.

Original Software Expands Developer Collaboration with TestPLAN 1.3

Original Software has announced the release of TestPLAN Version 1.3, a new test planning and management utility for applications running on OS/400 servers and Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database management systems. Originally launched last September, the Windows-based TestPLAN lets developers share document files, image files (such as screenshots), and data files, thereby enabling teams of testers to better understand and recreate bugs and defects. One of the key new features of Version 1.3 is the capability to copy, cut, and paste all or part of a test plan. Users can also automatically launch multiple test scripts using Original Software's PC products (TestDRIVE, TestGUI, and TestWEB) with this release, and they can also update and work with script results and variable data within a plan, the company says. Lastly, this release offers a wider range of report layout options, and offers detailed, cross-plan search and edit functions. In its first three months, TestPLAN attracted 30 customers in six countries, the company says.

inFORM Decision Launches New Release of iDocs Document Management Suite

inFORM Decisions recently launched iDocs Version 3.93, an updated release of its OS/400-based document management solution. This release adds several new features, including smart routing, which provides more automation in sorting spool files, extracting fax numbers and e-mail addresses from spool files, and relocating certain spool files to an alternative queue if an e-mail address is not found. The Southern California company has also bolstered iDoc's security with this release, first by allowing ownership of a spool file to be automatically changed from the current user to the security officer after it has been used once. This feature eliminates the possibility of a payroll clerk printing or distributing the same checks twice. Another new security feature limits access to spool files based on authorization, while new controls have also been added to enable or disable command line access. Better control over the archive process allows users to separate processed spool files based on the spool file type, the company says. Improvements have also been made to its e-mail module, called iMail, as well as its iMap, iView, and PDF Enabler modules.

LANSA Reports 100-Plus Customer Wins for UCCnet Direct Product

More than 100 companies have chosen LANSA's UCCnet Direct software to synchronize their product master database with the UCCnet's GLOBALregistry, the software company announced last week. The manufacturers and distributors in the consumer processed goods and hardlines industries--those companies most affected by UCCnet mandates by retailers to their suppliers--have either installed or are installing LANSA's UCCnet Direct as of January 1. In a separate announcement, LANSA announced that UCCnet Direct now runs on Linux and AIX, in addition to its previously supported operating systems, OS/400 and Windows. LANSA supports the Linux distributions from Red Hat and SuSE with UCCnet Direct, along with IBM's WebSphere application server technology for browser deployments. According to LANSA's director of business development Al Grega, more than 60,000 suppliers are looking for UCCnet solutions that run on AIX and Linux.

Profound Logic Plugs Into WDSc with RPG Smart Pages Tool

OS/400 shops can now use WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) to create Web applications that incorporate ILE RPG onto Web pages using Profound Logic's RPG Smart Pages development tool. When Profound launched RPGsp, in March 2003, the tool featured two components: a drag-and-drop HTML designer with a Windows-based RPG editor. Last week, the Dayton, Ohio, company announced a new release of RPGsp that allows iSeries developers to use WDSc to maintain, compile, test, and launch RPGsp applications. Specifically, Profound's hybrid RPG/HTML/SQL/JavaScript compiler now works within the WebSphere Page Designer and LPEX Editor components, allowing developers to insert, view, and change their RPG elements directly from WDSc.