News Briefs and Product Shorts

Touchtone Unveils New Outlook E-Mail Integration for Wintouch CRM

Touchtone is making it easier for companies that track their customer contacts using its OS/400-based CRM, but that communicate with their customers using Microsoft Outlook. Last week the Southern California CRM developer announced it has integrated its RPG-based application with the Microsoft e-mail client. The new integration enables e-mail opened within Outlook to be recorded as an Activity in Wintouch, ensuring an accurate and continuous customer history is maintained on the OS/400 database. Incoming e-mail can be opened in Outlook, tied to the appropriate customer record in Wintouch, and recorded in the Wintouch ActivityLog, the company says. E-mail attachments can also be saved in the Wintouch document repository, and tied to the customer record. "Our customers want to continue to use a familiar e-mail format and to have the added convenience of e-mail to related contacts and accounts within Wintouch," says Reza Saraf, Touchtone's founder and CEO. "With the client side complete, our developers are free to complete the integration of Microsoft Exchange Server to Wintouch." Over the next few months, the company's priority is to improve the flow between the calendaring and contact functions of Wintouch and Outlook, he added.

Cox Division Uses Flynet Viewer to Build .NET Interface to OS/400 App

Cox Communications has successfully developed new .NET-based extensions to its OS/400 applications using English software house Flynet's Flynet Viewer. According to Inventu, a New England reseller of the Flynet Viewer, a single .NET developer at the regional Cox Communications headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, created several utilities that automated previously manual and error-prone tasks, including managing disconnected cable service, managing voicemail password changes, and auto-populating service comments on new orders. Curtis Kelly, Cox Omaha's vice president of information technology, says the Flynet Viewer software helped his organization implement new interfaces that improved staff productivity, without requiring changes to be made to the back-end applications. "We are very pleased with Flynet Viewer and the services provided by Inventu. A short training session was enough to get our .NET developer going and we are now looking at other ways to use the product to our advantage," Kelly says.

Solzon to Resell Cybra's OS/400 Barcode Software

OS/400 barcode software developer Cybra and Solzon, a systems integrator specializing in iSeries radio frequency (RF) implementations, unveiled a new partnership this month. As part of the partnership, Solzon will become a reseller of Cybra's software, including the MarkMagic 5 Barcode Label, RFID Tag, and SM@RT Forms software packs. In addition to selling the software, Solzon will also implement Cybra's software, and integrate it with clients' applications. "We have been searching for the ideal products to handle the ever-increasing need for compliance labeling in the supply chain and we feel that CYBRA has these ideal products," says Phil Przybyszewski, vice president of sales and marketing at the Pembroke, New Hampshire, company.

Cybele Releases TN Bridge Host Integration Pack 3.5 for .NET Beta

Cybele Software this month unveiled the public beta of TN Bridge Host Integration Pack 3.5 for .NET, the next release of the company's flagship development tools for accessing and modernizing 5250 and 3270 applications from within the Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland Delphi integrated development environments. With this release, Cybele says it is including a new XML-to-Host bridging technology that enables users to publish midrange and mainframe applications as XML data sources. This release will also provide 100 percent .NET managed code for Visual Studio.NET and Delphi.NET developers, which should lessen the work required for developers to craft tight, leak-free code. (See "Microsoft Plugs 'Managed Code' as WinFX Goes to Beta" for Microsoft's take on the importance of managed code.) This release features several other enhancements, such as a new TN Pool implementation, session persistence of TN objects, and new "Type," "Press," and "PressAndWait" methods, among other enhancements. Based in Delaware, Cybele Software is the North American affiliate of Team Soft S.R.L., a Buenos Aires, Argentina, software developer that has been in the AS/400 business since 1993.

AdminServer Tests Life Insurance Software on IBM Hardware and Software

AdminServer, a developer of insurance software products, last week announced it and IBM have completed testing of AdminServer's J2EE-based life and annuity policy administration system running on WebSphere, DB2, and Linux on xSeries, pSeries, and iSeries servers. AdminServer says the tests were productive, and showed how the company can maintain sub-second transaction times with its J2EE module. "We appreciate IBM inviting us to their Innovation Lab and providing our team with the environment to accomplish the testing process," said Kevin Walma, vice president of business development. "These tests not only demonstrate our commitment to IBM and to leveraging the latest technology, but also prove the strength and flexibility of the architecture of the J2EE version of our system."

iWay Software Moves Beyond Adapters with New Toolset

At its annual user conference in Las Vegas last week, iWay Software unveiled new integration software that the company says takes it beyond adapters and connectors and into world of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The company introduced several new products as part of its integrated iWay Software 2005 suite of tools, including the Adaptive Framework for SOA, Adapter Manager, and Trading Manager. The Adaptive Framework includes a suite of new tools for creating and managing business flows among applications, and also includes the iWay crown jewels: the collection of 280 packaged adapters and connectors, supporting all major pre-packaged applications, data types, and e-business protocols. The iWay Adapter Manager is a runtime component that controls the interactions of those 280 connectors and adapters, or which, as iWay puts it, "enable integration implementers to introspect disparate information resources." Whereas the Adapter Manager controls and executes the actual data flows, the Adaptive Framework suite includes several other design tools, including the Application Explorer, the Adapter Designer, the Adapter Transformer (used for XML transformation), and the Trading Manager, a GUI console that helps users view and control the correlation of documents, transactions, trading partners, and communication or service channel. John Senor, the software company's president, says iWay Software 2005 marks a significant point in the evolution of the product. "We create fine-grained services from individual applications, aggregate them into coarsely grained business services, and incorporate them into Web and portal composite applications, B2B scenarios, as well as make it easier to deploy integration with our partner's integration brokers and BPM tools," he says.