News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Budget time should be less of a nuisance at Jacobus Energy now that the Madison, Wisconsin, company will be working to automate it using the new Budget Planner from Global Software. Jacobus Energy, an OS/400 shop, had been providing fuel and materials for heating and cooling homes and businesses in the Upper Midwest for more than 80 years. Last week Global Software announced that Jacobus Energy had added Budget Planner to its collection of other Global Software products, including Global General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Fixed Assets, and Spreadsheet Server. The Budget Manager, which was announced last year, works by extracting budget data from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and loading the data into the iSeries database. The Budget Manager provides the best of both worlds, Global Software says, combining the flexibility, ease of use, and modeling capabilities of spreadsheets with the "increased back-end capabilities" of the budget database.

• If you were running IBM Lotus Domino-based mail networks, the recent SQL Slammer worm didn't affect you. But that doesn't mean that the Net's nasty critters, which seem to have a special affinity for Microsoft products, won't ever be targeted at Domino. To that end, Symanetc released a new line of antivirus software for Domino at the Lotusphere show last week. The new product, called Symantec AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino, protects Domino databases running on Solaris, AIX, iSeries, Linux, and Windows NT/2000 servers. This update brings support for the latest version of Lotus Notes/Domino, version 6.0, in addition to a new rules-based content filtering feature. The new version of AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino also brings support for more e-mail attachment types.
  
  
• Sterling Commerce had excellent fourth-quarter 2002 sales of its Unix-based integration product, the Gentran Integration Suite, and as a result it will continue to drive momentum in 2003 by porting the software to Windows, OS/400, and OS/390, the Columbus, Ohio, company said last week. The Gentran Integration Suite provides an integration broker architecture that acts as a data type mediator among disparate applications, including support for XML, Web services protocols, and the range of enterprise adapters and connectors from iWay Software (an Information Builders company). The Gentran Integration Suite builds on top of Sterling's core EDI product, Gentran, by allowing users to incrementally attach additional components that provide B2B, EAI, and Web-enablement capabilities. Sterling planned to start shipping the Windows version of the Gentran Integration Suite on January 31, with OS/400 and OS/390 versions coming later this year.
  
  
• Teamstudio brought a range of enhancements last week with a new iteration of its Screensurfer Web-to-host software and accompanying Teamstudio Express integrated development environment. With Screensurfer 4.5, Teamstudio now supports the Japanese double-byte character set for mainframe applications. Screensurfer 4.5 also builds on its support for OS/400 and mainframe applications with support for Unix applications through VT100/102 emulation. Teamstudio also announced new capabilities in its IDE, Teamstudio Express 1.3, including a new offline cache function that allows development to continue even when not connected to a live application. Collectively, Teamstudio refers to Screensurfer 4.5 and Express 1.3 as its Edition 2 product. Screensurfer pricing starts at $6,995 for a 10-session license.
  
  
• California Software last week announced the version 6.5 release of its Loan Production System (LPS). The company says that new features in LPS 6.5 include absolute operating system and database independence. In addition to running the LPS system on OS/400, Windows, Unix, or Linux operating systems, the software will work with IBM's DB2 and Oracle's database software. Last October, the Irvine, California, software company announced that it has migrated its LPS product to the Microsoft Windows operating system using its Baby/iSeries migration tool. California Software offers different versions of its core LPS product for automotive, consumer, mortgage, and delinquent loans. The company acquired the developer of the LPS line, ALE Systems, in 2000. For more on California Software's LPS products, go to www.alesystems.com.
  
  
• SEDONA, the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, software company that sold its user base to Fiserv last year, announced a new release of its customer loyalty application last week. In addition to providing new internationalization capabilities that support the languages and currencies of foreign countries, such as Canada, for example, SEDONA says Intarsia 4.0 is loaded with capabilities that will help it sell through the company's new reseller model. Last November, SEDONA sold its customers because selling software and supporting customers proved too much of a drain on the company's core competency, which is writing software, company officials said. SEDONA continues to develop Intarsia, which runs on OS/400 and other platforms. Other new features in Intarsia 4.0 include the addition of a system administrator user profile, to set security configurations; the addition of different user access levels, such as view, edit, and delete capabilities; the capability to attach advertising "collateral" to a campaign created and tracked by Intarsia; and the conversion of all applets to servlets.
  

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