Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Your company may have much to gain by moving to an electronic archiving system. Did you know that for every 12 filing cabinets added to an organization, one additional employee must be hired, on average, to maintain them? This statistic, from a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (now an IBM consulting division), seems right up Help/Systems' alley, and a new release of that company's OS/400 report management system, Robot/REPORTS, make its distribution and archiving capabilities even easier to use.

Creating electronic archives is one of the things you can do with Robot/REPORTS. While the package lets you create and manage your archive on a variety of media (including disk, optical disk, tape, microfiche, and, yes, even paper), it has several other uses, too.

For example, Robot/REPORTS lets you transform raw report output from your OS/400 application into highly customized reports for each user or group of users. This is one of the highlights of the software. Help/Systems' fourth-generation language, called OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL), is used by Robot/REPORTS to look for specific keywords in reports and to segment your user's reports in the manner most useful to them.

Once you've created the reports you want, Robot/REPORTS supports several methods of distribution. If your users want a printout, the software can bundle and burst the reports to any network printer. But the most useful output supported by Robot/REPORTS is probably its capability to transform the OS/400 report into the PDF format. Once the report is saved as a PDF, it can be posted to an intranet or Internet site, sent as an attachment to an e-mail, or viewed by using the free and ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat reader.

If your users want their reports via e-mail, Robot/REPORTS supports an interface to Robot/CLIENT and Robot/ALERTS. These other Help/Systems products are required for sending Robot/REPORTS reports via e-mail. In addition to PDF, Robot/REPORTS generates HTML, and its reports can be formatted for spreadsheet programs.

Earlier this summer, Help/Systems started shipping Robot/REPORTS 7.0. The key enhancement with this release is the introduction of a new Web-browser-based interface. While previous releases used a PC-based client, the new Web interface, called the Robot Browser Interface, will allow anybody with a computer capable of supporting a browser to access generated reports.

The product's new Robot Browser Interface includes functions for both administrators and users. Help/Systems says administrators can use the new interface to group report recipients, design a specific Web page for each group, and send important system messages. Recipients, meanwhile, will be able to view their reports directly from the Robot Browser Interface, as well as access Web links and perform various other tasks, Help/Systems says.

Other new features delivered with Robot/REPORTS 7.0 include improved translation capabilities for increased international language support. With this enhancement, Robot/REPORTS can more accurately display characters of a report that has been translated. For example, if an English user processes a report in English containing dollar signs, users in other languages will see the same dollar sign that the English user sees, according to a Help/Systems' technical staff member.

Robot/REPORT 7.0 also features a new interface to Robot/TRANSFORM, Help/Systems' recently announced utility that converts OS/400 spool files and IFS files into PDF documents (see "Help/Systems Embraces the PDF with New Conversion Utility" for more on Robot/TRANSFORM).

Robot/REPORTS 7.0 is available now. For more information, go to www.helpsystems.com.