News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Two counties in Wisconsin last week reported the successful implementations of new electronic document management systems that augment and extend their OS/400-based land-records-management systems. Racine and Washington counties have integrated Ingeo Systems' Electronic Recording System with their TriMin Systems' Land Records Management System to allow mortgage companies to prepare and submit digital lien releases to county register of deeds offices without having to use a single piece of paper. The new electronically submitted documents can be processed manually or automatically, and the time it takes to record transactions has dropped from an average of days, or even weeks, to between one and three minutes on average. The entire process is now electronic, with XML-based documents being digitally signed and notarized. The implementations began about a year ago, when the register of deeds for Racine and Washington counties, Mark Ladd and Sharon Martin, decided to collaborate on the project, since both used TriMin's Land Records Management System. It was the first time that Ingeo had worked on two implementations with a single project staff, and it was also the first time integrating with an iSeries host. Despite the hard work, it has paid off. "I feel like I've been pushing a big rock up a very steep hill for a long time and it's finally going to go over the edge tomorrow," said Ladd on the eve of the first electronic recording, which was successful. Ingeo and TriMin expect to be working together on similar implementations in the future.

• Varsity Logistics is introducing, at the COMMON conference this week, a new release of its OS/400 software, which is designed to help companies control shipping costs. ShipAudit compares freight bills with negotiated carrier rates and discounts, allowing users to identify and recover overpaid shipping expenses. New features in ShipAudit 1.1 include the capability to extract data from a carrier's billing spreadsheets, which should speed the analysis process. ShipAudit also accepts this data through electronic data interchange (EDI). The latest release also includes new function keys and reports that enable an accounting department to allocate shipping costs to different cost accounts. ShipAudit 1.0 first shipped in early 2002.
  
  
• Teamstudio has released Teamstudio Analyzer for Java Edition 2, an update of its audit tool for Java programmers. Analyzer for Java helps programmers to write clean Java code by detecting errors and noncompliance with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard. This inexpensive tool includes more than 200 rules for detecting common coding errors, like incorrect comparisons, incorrect use of names, issues with unused elements, and more. With Edition 2, Teamstudio adds support for Sun Microsystems' SunOne Studio 4.0, Oracle's JDeveloper 9.0.3 and later, and NetBeans' IDE 3.3 and later. Analyzer for Java supports other popular Java integrated development environments, including Eclipse, Borland JBuilder, and IBM WebSphere. Teamstudio Analyzer for Java is priced at $195 per user.
  
  
• TurningPoint Systems, a Danvers, Massachusetts, developer of warehouse and distribution software for the pharmaceutical, candy and tobacco, and food service industries, recently announced that it has renamed its suite of OS/400 software and delivered a new module that adds mobile capabilities. The company is changing the name of its ERP suite from DisTrack to ProfitPoint, to better reflect the company's growth beyond traditional warehouse tracking to the wider supply chain, according to the company. At the same time, TurningPoint has introduced the newest ProfitPoint module, an application called Route Accounting, designed to allow route salesmen to update inventory, to print invoices on-site, and to accurately record transactions while on the road. Route Accounting was developed by Solid Innovation, a Prince Albert, Canada, company. TurningPoint further augmented its ProfitPoint suite in February by signing reseller agreements for financial analysis applications that are now integrated with ProfitPoint.
  
  
• One of England's largest distributors has chosen enterprise application integration (EAI) software from SeeBeyond to integrate its prepackaged legacy, OS/400, and Oracle applications. Nisa-Today's is creating a single platform to streamline connectivity between its Retek retail management ERP system and its other applications, in order to replace its merchandising and distribution applications and create a new order capture system based on Retek's software. Nisa-Today's is the largest buying group for independent retail and wholesale companies in Great Britain. The company negotiates the lowest prices and operates several large warehouses for its 781 retail and wholesale member companies, which together have annual revenues of 15 billion pounds, or more than $24 billion at current exchange rates.
  
  
• The folks at McDonald's Germany may have been seriously troubled over serving a Quarter Pounder in a country that long ago gave up the English measurement system. But one thing McDonald's German organization won't be losing much sleep over is the AS/400 Model 640 that runs its financial systems. Last week, British iSeries systems management software provider CCSS announced that McDonald's Germany uses its QSystem Monitor and QMessage Monitor systems management software to ensure that the old Model 640 that handles a good chunk of McDonald's international finance, accounting, and salary management doesn't get overloaded. QSystem Monitor is used primarily to keep an eye on the Model 640's CPU usage, in addition to monitoring interactive and batch jobs and employees with high CPU usage. Together, QSystem Monitor and QMessage Monitor have come to the rescue on at least one occasion. CCSS relates a story about a McDonald's IT staffer who received a page from QMessage Monitor alerting him that the Model 640's disk capacity was at 98 percent. "Had we not received the message and resolved the situation immediately, our administrative officers may not have been able to access the system for a couple of days; the financial implications of that are very significant," he said. In other cases, QSystem Monitor has detected problems in the RAID array and defective disks and controllers. By the way, because Germany uses the metric system, the Quarter Pounder becomes "Hamburger Royal." In some other European countries, it is called the "McRoyal."
  

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