News Briefs and Product Shorts

• CCSS is now shipping QSystem Monitor 11.0, the latest release of its client/server performance monitoring and reporting software for OS/400 servers. Originally announced in February (see "CCSS to Keep a Closer Eye on LPAR Performance"), QSystem Monitor 11.0 was designed to keep an eye on new types of iSeries workloads, including logical partitioning (LPAR), independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs), and processors on demand. The capability to monitor LPAR performance was added to the online monitoring component of the product, which features five new monitoring bars for watching the amount of processor power dedicated to server workloads, the amount dedicated to database workloads, and the amount of processor, memory, and interactive processing power that is dedicated to each partition. LPAR information has also been added to QSystem Monitor's system view and summary view windows, which give graphical depictions of resource use. The product's disk summary module has also been enhanced to provide more information relevant to OS/400's Integrated File System (IFS), while new disk collection schedule and physical disk monitoring features have been added to provide more information relevant to ASPs. Companies activating dormant iSeries processors can get a quick verification on those processors through a window added to QSystem Monitor. Additionally, CCSS has added a new minimum threshold setting to assist operators in maintaining performance characteristics, while a new "work with job" feature helps track down processor-hungry jobs by user name, job name, or jobs using the most processor power.

• Upsher-Smith Laboratories, a fast growing pharmaceutical company in Plymouth, Minnesota, has successfully completed a multi-million-dollar installation of SAP's ERP software on iSeries servers, Upsher-Smith's consultants, PRAGMATEK Consulting Group, announced last week. Upsher-Smith will rely on the SAP software to manage core business processes, including sales and marketing, production planning, formulations, packaging, procurement, order entry, distribution, inventory, charge-back processing, and finance. The software also helps the lab comply with Food and Drug Administration regulatory requirements, including documenting and tracing products. The installation also provides plenty of headroom for Upsher-Smith, a privately held company with 500 employees that expects its revenues to quadruple by 2010, to $1 billion.
  
  
• German software developer Goering iSeries Solutions last week announced an update to iExcelGen, its native OS/400 software for exporting data to Microsoft Excel. New features with this release include e-mail capabilities, support for large files (more than 65,000 records), the capability to split multiple line reports, and the option of outputting OS/400 reports in dBase. With this release, iExcelGen can be configured to automatically send the Excel files it creates to a list of e-mail recipients. Without the tool, users would have to manually download the data, import it into Excel, attach the report to an e-mail, then type in the e-mail address. The iExcelGen product works with any SMTP e-mail server and can be executed in batch or from a command line.
  
  
• Patrick Townsend & Associates last week announced its OS/400 FTP software has been enhanced to provide automated and secure file transfers with BellSouth's AICXFER FTP server. With the company's Alliance FTP Manager software, companies can connect their OS/400 servers directly to BellSouth's FTP server, instead of relying on magnetic tape or PC transfers. Pat Townsend says its Alliance SSL FTP client application supports the Clear Command Channel operation, required by the BellSouth FTP server, and makes it possible to communicate with BellSouth through normal firewall configurations. The Pat Townsend software also supports automated polling of the BellSouth server. Users can set the Alliance FTP Manager software to automatically check BellSouth for new files, to download only the new ones, and then to process them through an RPG or CL program. Users can also send files back to BellSouth, using Alliance FTP Manager.
  
  
• Raz-Lee last week announced a new service called "Tree Building," which helps programmers write custom software that can be plugged into iSeries Navigator and Eclipse. With Tree Building, the company explains, customers provide a "conceptual menu seed," which Raz-Lee "plants" inside of iSeries Navigator, Eclipse, or Windows GUIs. The service lets developers write an application just once and have it visible and accessible through iSeries Navigator, through the Eclipse development environment, or as a stand-alone application tree. No knowledge of iSeries Navigator is necessary, and the service is applicable to new and existing applications, the company says. Last year, Raz-Lee, an Israeli software company, offered its Firewall+++ OS/400 security tool as a plug-in to Operations Navigator (which IBM has since renamed as the iSeries Navigator).
  
  
• Companies developing in Java have a new way to connect their Java applications with legacy databases, using the Java Data Objects (JDO) specification. SolarMetric recently introduced an updated version of its Kodo JDO data mapping tool that provides developers with a way to link Java applications to a range of legacy data stores and transaction management systems, including the 5250 and 3270 protocols, CICS, Tuxedo, WebSphere MQ, MSMQ, and others. Kodo JDO was designed to reduce the time and effort required to link relational databases to Java applications using JDO. With its Kodo JDO tool in hand, SolarMetric says, developers don't need to be experts in relational-database design or to be SQL pros in order to get the database and application talking to each other. With this release, SolarMetric has opened Java applications to a wide class of non-relational data stores.
  
  

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