News Briefs and Product Shorts

• The next time the roulette table treats you well at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, and the casino's staff presents you with a tax form, you'll happily report your haul, knowing the form was printed from an AS/400 server using ACOM Solutions' EZeDocs/400 forms software. The Long Beach, California, company announced last week that The Venetian--soon to be the third-largest luxury resort in the world--is installing EZeDocs/400 and EZPayManager/400 to manage electronic-document and payment processes on its three AS/400 servers. The Venetian selected ACOM over other offerings for a variety of factors, says the casino's software development manager, Wes Wunders. Wunders appreciated the capability in EZeDocs/400 to create a form and modify it either on the PC, where the GUI forms designer resides, or on the AS/400 computer, where the forms are stored for use. In addition to the W2G tax form, EZeDocs/400 will generate front-desk registration cards, among other forms, when the software goes live this month in conjunction with the opening of a new tower with 1,000 hotel rooms. EZPayManager/400 and EZeDocs/400 accept data from SSA Global Technologies' Infinium 2000 financial management software; Inter-American Data's LMS Lodging Management System, the primary hotel operations software; Advanced Casino Systems Corp.'s casino management system; and an inventory management system from Stratton Warren (recently acquired by Inter-American Data.

• TurnOver change management, from SoftLanding Systems, last week received IBM's validation for Ready for WebSphere Studio V2, including WebSphere Studio Workbench V2 and WebSphere Studio V5. It is the first iSeries-specific software to achieve Ready for WebSphere Studio status. To achieve the WebSphere validation, which signifies that IBM considers it a quality solution, products must meet IBM's established Workbench and Studio Family integration criteria and pass a testing process. The TurnOver for WebSphere Studio plug-ins embed native iSeries change-management support in WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries, making TurnOver's functions virtually indistinguishable from native WebSphere Development Studio Client functions. Using the plug-ins, developers can work with RPG, SQL, or any native iSeries object, with full change management support--from work request to multiplatform deployment--without leaving WebSphere Development Studio Client. It is expected that many iSeries software vendors also will integrate their tooling with the open-source, Eclipse-based WebSphere Studio tools to gain both native iSeries and Web development capabilities. Steve Gapp, president and CEO of SoftLanding Systems, calls it "an important milestone for both SoftLanding and the iSeries market." In addition to supporting native iSeries development, TurnOver for WebSphere Studio supports non-iSeries development, from within any Eclipse-based IDE, including WebSphere Development Studio Client, WSAD, and WSSD. The plug-ins require TurnOver 5.3 and WDSC 5.0 or higher, or any other IDE that's based on Eclipse 2.0 or higher, such as WSSD or WSAD.
  
  
• Island Pacific is launching a new service aimed at helping retailers reverse their losses as a way to boost the bottom line. The Irvine, California, provider of OS/400-based ERP systems for retailers will this week announce the new loss-prevention offering, called IP Gladiator, at the NRF Loss Prevention show in San Antonio, Texas. IP Gladiator will be delivered via application service provider (ASP) mode and will be accessible from any point-of-sale system used for exception reporting. Specifically, the application attempts to manage all aspects of loss prevention, including generation of leads and opportunities, control of investigations from incident through case and collection, and orchestration of the many processes required for an effective loss-prevention program, the company says.
  
  
• Spam. It's obvious the resource-sucking phenomenon isn't getting any better, but spam has been getting a lot of attention of late, and many software vendors have responded with new applications to clamp down on the electronic scourge. One of the latest is MailMarshal SMTP 5.5, a new release of NetIQ's e-mail scanning application. This new release of MailMarshal SMTP features an improved heuristic anti-spam engine designed to reduce the number of false alarms. Also with this release, users can let the software automatically contact NetIQ headquarters to update itself with the latest spam identifiers. Other new features include a new antivirus cleanup and management utility and a recycle bin for infected or suspicious e-mail. NetIQ MailMarshal SMTP runs on Wintel servers and works with all SMTP mail systems, including SendMail, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Domino, Linux mail servers, and Microsoft Exchange. NetIQ acquired the MailMarshal line in December with the acquisition of Marshal Software. The San Jose, California, company also acquired OS/400 security specialist PentaSafe Security Technologies last year.
  
  
• Asymex recently announced the immediate availability of SpooliT Enterprise 2.5, the latest release of its suite of document management tools for AS/400 and iSeries servers. SpooliT Enterprise has four components, including SpooliT Server, Explorer, Browser, and Viewer, which provide a range of document management capabilities, such as automatic distribution of OS/400 reports via e-mail and fax, PC-based archival systems, and data extraction capabilities. With SpooliT Enterprise 2.5, Asymex has introduced new capabilities for using Microsoft Excel templates to mine OS/400 reports for data. By using Excel templates to establish a set of rules defining how SpooliT should export the contents of the OS/400 spool file, users can be selective about which rows or columns are selected for data export into Excel. Users can define rules to select or omit the data they want included in the final report. This new feature is further enhanced by the capability to link template rules to categorization and distribution rules in the SpooliT scheduler. SpooliT Enterprise 2.5 is available for download from the Australian company's Web site, at www.asymex.com. The license fee is $7,995.
  
  
• Global Software reports that Draka Elevator Products, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, is getting good results from Global's Spreadsheet Server Executive Manager, a program that lets users build views of data stored on iSeries servers. Susan Price, business analyst for Draka Elevator, says the Spreadsheet Server Executive Manager solves two problems. "It has substantial time savings in processing the reports required for accounting and sales, and it gives them the ability to retrieve data they did not have access to in the past," she says. Downloading information from an OS/400 server to Microsoft Excel used to take 20 minutes, but now takes less than one minute, Price says.
  
  

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