The Shenandoah Life Insurance Company is finding success creating a portal that connects its OS/400-based policy management system with a Lotus Notes-based Web portal. The Roanoke, Virginia, company is using the Transidiom integration tool from SEAGULL to connect Genelco Group+, an insurance application from Genelco Software Solutions, with GroupStar, a home-rolled application that gives Shenandoah Life partners and customers access to company information over the Web. Shenandoah Life is using Transidiom to generate XML statements from the Genelco application, giving GroupStar users, including regional sales offices, marketing partners, and policyholders, the capability to execute account inquiries and look up billing and payment information. The next phase of the implementation, scheduled for deployment in the fourth quarter of 2002, will allow users to perform real-time policyholder eligibility, enrollment, and termination transactions. At some point in the future, Shenandoah Life plans to use its GroupStar portal to provide users with direct access to thousands of individual policyholders, claimants, and agents.

Better On-line Solutions has issued alternate session support with the latest version of its e-Twin@x Controller, a networking device that provides twinax-connected clients with secure access to host OS/400 servers over TCP/IP. The new Alternate Sessions feature released in Version 3 of the controller enables the user to toggle between two concurrent display sessions configured on the same twinax address. Additionally, the sessions can be configured to different host computers. B.O.S. says one of the advantages of this new feature has to do with background batch job processing. Previously, when a user switched sessions, batch job processing would end on the first session. With the Alternate Sessions feature, the batch job processing continues in the background. B.O.S. is selling the controller under a newly created subsidiary called BOScom.

Maximum Availability announced its first North American customer signed a contract in May. Edmonton Tube and Alloy is deploying the New Zealand software company's OS/400 high availability system, called *noMAX, on AS/400 and iSeries servers at company offices located throughout Canada. Like many AS/400 shops, Edmonton Tube and Alloy's business has grown in recent years, and along with that growth comes a greater risk of damage due to a system outage. Despite the potential damage a crash would create, the company still found it difficult to justify the expense of a traditional OS/400 high availability system, said the company's information systems manager in a testimonial on Maximum Availability's Web site. However, the IS manager said the price of the *noMAX data replication software fit his company's budget. He downloaded *noMAX off the Web, and found the software capable for replicating key data libraries between the company's production iSeries Model 270 in Edmonton and an AS/400 Model 600 in Calgary.

Vision Solutions today announced a new OEM deal to bundle its Symbiator data replication software with a barcode program for J.D. Edwards environments. Vision Solutions' deal with Jacksonville, Florida, based ICS entails integrating Symbiator 4.0 with RF-SMART, ICS's wireless data collection application, for users of J.D. Edwards' OneWorld ERP software suite. ICS also offers RF-SMART for WorldSoftware implementations. Vision Solutions made the announcement--its first OEM deal for Symbiator--from FOCUS 2002, J.D. Edwards' annual user conference, which began Monday.

J.D. Edwards' OneWorld Xe suite of ERP software has been recertified as IBM ClusterProven, Lakeview Technology, its clustering partner, announced yesterday at the J.D. Edwards FOCUS 2002 user conference in Denver, Colorado. To achieve IBM's ClusterProven stamp of approval, software vendors must meet certain criteria that show the application can function in a clustered iSeries environment. J.D. Edwards first achieved ClusterProven status for iSeries implementations of OneWorld (it also runs on Windows and Unix systems) in February 2001, as a result of Lakeview's MIMIX FastPath cluster-enabling service. The recertification was necessary to demonstrate OneWorld's capability to work with MIMIX 4.4, the latest release of Lakeview's OS/400 clustering software announced in April 2002. In other Lakeview news, the company is moving to a new office this week. The company had been occupying multiple levels of a building in Oak Brook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Lakeview's new digs in Oakbrook Terrace are reportedly bigger, newer, and are all on the same level.