News Briefs and Product Shorts

• IBM last week released "The Legends of iSeries," a series of short film clips about the incredible feats and accomplishments of the iSeries and its predecessors, the AS/400 and S/36. Two "legends" clips were available on The Legends of iSeries Web page last week. The first is a story about how an AS/400 survived a tornado that hit Texas and caused $400 million in damages. According to the story, the tornado ripped the roof off the company's building, flooding the server room with water. The AS/400 was soaked, but miraculously fired right up after drying out on a stack of computer manuals. The other story features a variation on the oft-heard yarn of the long-forgotten AS/400 that gets locked away inside a little-used closet or room for a long period of time, until an IBM service rep shows up one day to fix it, confusing everybody. These first two edgy videos focus on the OS/400 server's strongest trait: its reliability. IBM's eServer iSeries marketing team originally got the idea of communicating these OS/400 customer tales as a series of urban legends. But the urban legend name apparently fell out of favor, which is probably a good thing, considering urban legends are, by definition, untrue. However, IBM manages to cast doubt on the validity of everything in the videos by ending each two-minute-long segment with the teller of the tale saying, "And this story is completely true. That's what they say." To view the movies, go to The Legends of iSeries Web page.

• Gumbo Software is selling updated versions of Report Designer and Report Manager, two programmer utilities for automating report distribution, and for creating and maintaining DDS and RPG report record formats, respectively. With Report Manager V1R9, Gumbo has made a number of enhancements to its e-mail generation capabilities, including using the QtmmSendMail API to generate e-mail, instead of the OS/400 Send Distribution command, which imposed several inconvenient restrictions, such as the requirement that senders be enrolled in the system distribution directory, and the limitation of file names to eight characters. However, use of the new mail API provides less support for OfficeVision users, Gumbo says. Several other e-mail related enhancements were made, including the use of *UFT8 encoding for e-mail, elimination of the subject line when it is left blank in an e-mail, a new mail setup menu, and a new command for displaying the OS/400 mail log. Other enhancements include an installation verification option, a new PDF manual, and partition licensing options. With Report Designer V2R6, Gumbo has added several fixes, a PDF manual, and an installation verification feature, and has removed the automated PTF update process.
  
  
• OS/400 systems management specialist CCSS last week announced that the European operations of Japanese rubber products giant Newell Rubbermaid has implemented the entire catalog of CCSS products. Newell Rubbermaid recently completed the installation of QSystem Monitor, QMessage Monitor, and QRemote Control to help manage three iSeries servers at its European data centre in Sunderland, England. The manufacturer, an Intentia shop, needed systems management software to ensure the availability of server resources for the corporation's 2,500 employees across Europe. The company uses QSystem Monitor to keep an eye on important iSeries performance variables, such as CPU usage, response time, and the growth of disk resources. QSystem Monitor also generates a daily report that Newell Rubbermaid imports into its Cognos reporting system. QMessage Monitor is used to filter out unimportant system messages and to escalate the critical ones, while, with QRemote Control, Newell Rubbermaid IT staffers can use their mobile phones to receive iSeries messages, and to respond instantly, if need be.
  
  
• BOSaNOVA last week announced a new kit that adds 802.11b wireless LAN capability to the company's thin client terminal. The $175 kit provides an 802.11b PCMCIA card, a PCMCIA slot, and 802.11b wireless support for the company's LTC-600 Thin Client. "Wireless makes a lot of sense in large, open locations such as warehouses," says Martin Pladgeman, BOSaNOVA president. "Wireless gives them more flexibility and freedom, since they don't need repeaters and won't have to restring wires every time they reconfigure the space." The LTC-600 Thin Client features a 533 MHz processor; 128 MB memory; an Ethernet card; serial, parallel, and USB ports; and an optional smart card reader. It has a Linux operating system; 5250 and 3270 emulation; Citrix connectivity; the option of Netscape, Mozilla, or Opera Web browsers; a PDF reader; Java Virtual Machine; and a media player.
  
  
• Do you work for a small company that is looking for an affordable iSeries ERP solution? Xdata solutions says it's celebrating its 10th anniversary by "firing shots wounding the biggest name in ERP software." The Elkhart, Indiana, company sells two lines of ERP software--the older XMAS/400 line, which was developed in RPG, and GXD, a redeveloped version of XMAS/400 that Xdata recently wrote in ASNA Visual RPG and runs on OS/400 and Windows. Xdata says it is selling complete licenses for either its iSeries or its Windows ERP suite for $995 per seat. This is a little less than half off the $27,500 list price for its XMAS/400/Express product, which comes with 15 seats. That seems like a deal, any which way you look at it.
  
  
• In mid-July, Dharma Systems, a New Hampshire developer of legacy integration software for OS/400 and mainframe, announced the latest release of its flagship product, eUnify 5.0. Funny thing was, the announcement, which was posted to the company's Web site, was dated June 2002, taking all "newsiness" out of the news. A quick call to Dharma confirmed that the company had only recently posted the 13-month-old announcement to its Web site. Was this some kind of oversight, a retroactive Y2K glitch? Unfortunately, this kind of maneuver happens quite often throughout the industry. While one might think that a business would treat its Web site as a window through which the world can learn the latest news about the company, this is often not the case. Many companies these days, both inside the OS/400 community and outside of it, fail to update their Web sites on a regular basis. Amazingly, there are some OS/400 software vendors that haven't updated their Web sites since 1999! This type of e-neglect sends the message that the company really doesn't care how it appears to the world, which may or may not be true. Problem is, some potential customers won't care to find out.
  
  

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