News Briefs and Product Shorts

• Maple Leaf Foods, a $4.7 billion Canadian food-processing company, is installing Kronos' iSeries Central labor management application to improve employee productivity in its plants, Kronos announced last week. Maple Leaf employs 10,000 people in 100 different locations across North America, including manufacturing plants that produce hog and chicken products, bakery products, and pet food. The company, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, will use various methods to collect labor data from employees, including biometric hand scanners, proximity readers, and badge terminals. The iSeries Central application will be connected to its ADP payroll processing service and its Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions for human resources. "We're excited about the decision, and are already looking for ways to align the Kronos solution with our overarching Six Sigma philosophy," says Keith Ritchie, manager of finance and control systems at Maple Leaf. The Six Sigma philosophy refers to statistical terms used to measure how far a given process deviates from perfection.

• Group 1 Software is shipping an updated version of its MailStream Plus application, which helps companies presort their mail to get the lowest possible rate from the United States Postal Service. MailStream Plus is now Presort Accuracy Validation and Evaluation, or PAVE, certified for the new USPS presort regulations that go into effect on April 30. MailStream Plus now produces the Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN) file that enables users to participate in the USPS PostalOne! electronic initiative, which is designed to streamline and improve the presort process. Group 1 has also released new technology for use with its CODE-1 Plus address validation software designed to reduce shipping costs. The new Residential Delivery Indicator technology helps shippers determine whether a shipping address corresponds with a business or a residence. Because some shippers charge more for shipping to residences, the Residential Delivery Indicator technology assists with best-rate negotiations. Users must license the Residential Delivery Indicator file directly from the USPS. Both CODE-1 Plus and MailStream Plus run on OS/400, as well as other major platforms. In other Group 1 news, the company announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire key assets of Sagent, a provider of extract, transform, and load (ETL) business intelligence software, for $17 million.
  
  
• CommercialWare last week launched a new version of CWDirect (formerly retail.dot.commerce), the Natick, Massachusetts, software company's OS/400-based order management application for multi-channel retailers. Major enhancements delivered with CWDirect 7.0 include closer integration with CWStore, CommercialWare's point-of-sale module, new APIs for sharing data with legacy systems, better integration with WebSphere Commerce, an improved GUI, and streamlined credit card authorization, deposit processing, and fraud protection. The improved integration with CWStore will allow retailers to get a better view of customer activity by sharing information collected through the retail POS with information gathered from the online and catalog channels via CWDirect 7.0. The new integration will allow customers to return items purchased through the store through Internet or call center channels.
  
  
• Host emulation software vendor Zephyr last week took its competitive pursuit of Attachmate's customers to new heights when it announced the introduction of its new Attachmate Macro Conversion Tool. This tool is designed to automatically convert the proprietary Attachmate macros, which were developed using EXTRA! Objects, into standard macros for use with PASSPORT, Zephyr's emulation software for iSeries, zSeries, DEC, and Unix hosts. In February, Zephyr launched its PASSPORT Object Toolkit for migrating Attachmate EXTRA! Personal Client 5250, 3270, and VT220 emulation sessions to Zephyr's own PASSPORT PC to HOST or PASSPORT WEB to HOST software. Companies that purchase more than 500 seats of Zephyr's software get the Attachmate Macro Conversion Tool for free.
  
  
• The Web Services Interoperability Organization last week announced the availability of the pre-release beta versions of two new testing tools for ensuring the proper function of Web services developed in C# or Java. The new Web Service Communication Monitor is used to capture messages exchanged between Web services (such as HTTP-based SOAP messages) and the software that invokes them, and it stores the messages for later analysis. The new Web Service Profile Analyzer evaluates messages captured by the Web Service Communication Monitor, and also validates the description and registration artifacts of the Web service. This includes the WSDL documents that describe the Web service and the XML schema files that describe the data types used in the WSDL service definition and in the UDDI registration entries. To download the new tools, go to www.ws-i.org.
  
  
• California Software last week announced a new version of baby.NET, the company's Web-to-host software for mainframes and OS/400 servers. Features in baby.NET 2.0 include a new visual editor that uses XML rendering to redesign 5250 applications for the Web. The software, based on Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET, provides compatibility with the .NET architecture, as well as the capability to access legacy systems using wireless PDAs and Web-enabled cell phones. The company says it has also improved the scalability with the latest version.
  
  

Sponsored By FAST400

What makes IBM different from Microsoft regarding Fast400?? What is Fast400? You are hearing a lot about Fast400 aren't you? But what is Fast400? Fast400 is a "tuning" product for the iSeries. Fast400 will allow an iSeries server to utilize the available CPW for interactive processing. IBM would have you believe that these interactive cards that cost thousands to millions of dollars, actually add value to your server. By buying Fast400, you do not ever need to buy anther interactive card for your iSeries. For a free demonstration of Fast400, please visit www.fast400.net. Why Fast400? A few years ago Microsoft would not let other software companies build tools to work with the Windows operating system. Microsoft did all kinds of scurrilous things to stop other manufacturers software from working on their platform. They would put code in the base operating system that prevented other companies code from working properly. IBM even had these issues with Operations Navigator. In the early days of Operations Navigator, the developers in Rochester had to scrap early versions because Microsoft did not want IBM leverage on what was proprietary to them. Netscape also had a few problems using the Windows operating system. The result Now we all know what happened to Microsoft. After spending tens of millions of our tax dollars in the trial, the US government told Microsoft that they were acting as a monopoly and what they did was not right or fair. The similarity IBM is doing exactly the same thing to Fast400 as Microsoft did. IBM has changed the operating system of the iSeries 400 to prevent Fast400 from working. In fact this has been done several times now, and each time the Fast400 developers produce a new fix to circumvent the IBM action. Why does IBM do this? because Fast400 takes money out of IBM's pocket. The potential for IBM to make billions from its user base, for delivering virtually no product is tantamount to corporate deception! Did IBM change the operating system when EMC introduced a low cost storage solution for the iSeries? The future The cat and mouse game between IBM and Fast400 is already a year old. Every time IBM changes the operating system to disable Fast400, the developers of Fast400 produce a new version within days to enable it again. Does Fast400 have a commercial agenda? Of course it does. Fast400 is in business to provide its clients with added benefits, which will maximise the interactive performance of iSeries 400 servers. And as we are a business, why shouldn't we charge a nominal fee for that service? A fee that our clients see as being fair and proper. After all, it's not Fast400 that is making enemies in the user base. As long as IBM wants to play "David and Goliath" we will continue to "out" the giant. Fast400 is not running, you can be assured!! For more information, please visit www.fast400.net.