Computer Keyes Launches OS/400 Archive Tool

Published: May 9, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Are your output queues starting to look like refugee camps for generations of wayward spool files? If they are, Computer Keyes has a new product for you. The company recently launched an archive utility called Keyes Archive that's aimed at helping OS/400 shops keep their valuable spool files--and the important data they contain--within easy reach, while at the same time alleviating the output-queue crunch.

OS/400 shops across the land are using their output queues in ways that God and IBM did not intend--namely, they are using them as long-term storage boxes, instead of the short-term paths to printers they were originally built for.

"Many people are leaving spool files in their output queues, which leads to problems at a later date," says John Keyes, owner and lead developer at Computer Keyes. "They keep piling up."

While there are benefits to keeping a spool file intact, there are problems with this approach. For one, trying to find the right invoice in an output queue holding thousands of spool files can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Likewise, since output queues cannot be replicated, a system upgrade can erase the spool files.

"IBM realized people were leaving spool files in a output queue, and added new stuff, because they recognized the problem," Keyes says. However, the spool file archive utility that debuted with OS/400 V5R3 is less than useful because it doesn't do indexing, he says.

The new KeyesArchive utility supports indexing, and a bunch more. Users can index their spool files, or even individual documents within their spool files, according to any field they want.

Perhaps the coolest feature in KeyesArchive is also its simplest feature: It can keep the spool file in its native format. Instead of converting the spool files to PDF documents, which seems to be a very popular thing these days, the KeyesArchive simply moves the spool file to a separate IFS directory, or a directory on an attached network server, after indexing the file.

KeyesArchive can also convert spool files into PDFs and TIFFs, if that's what the user wants to do. But Keyes cautions users against taking this approach. "Say another product comes out in the future, and the users wish they had their spool files. We can [work with those future products] because we maintain the spool files-the basic raw state. That's the reason we're not converting them to PDF first," he says.

OS/400 Spool file documents are also very compact, taking up just a few hundred bytes, compared to tens of kilobytes for other types of document formats. "There are very few tools that can turn a PDF into something else," Keyes says. "We felt it was important to maintain the spool file in its original state."

KeyesArchive integrates with other OS/400 utilities from ComputerKeyes, including KeyesFax, KeyesMail, and KeyesOverlay, which uses PCL. The product works with standard spool files, including SCS printer files, AFPDS, and USERASCII file formats, the company says.

Keyes is already at work on version 2.0 of the product, which will feature an integrated HTTP server and the capability to display spool files in a browser. "It's all green screen right now," he says. "In the future will be browser-based."

KeyesArchive version 1 is available now. The product requires OS/400 V4R4 or higher, and costs $3,250 per system or LPAR. For more information, visit www.computerkeyes.com.