Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Companies that use J.D. Edwards' OneWorld software are getting new capabilities for managing the documents generated by the ERP suite. Create!form International recently started shipping a new version of its special-purpose electronic forms management software, called Create!form for JDE OneWorld 2.0, that has a number of enhancements, including a new GUI, new pagination options, support for Asian languages, and other new features.

Create!form for JDE OneWorld is not much different from the company's standard electronic forms management software for OS/400, Unix, and Windows systems, called Create!form, which is currently at version 2.5. The main difference between the two product sets is that Create!form for JDE OneWorld is optimized to work with the PDF output that OneWorld generates (J.D. Edwards is unique among ERP vendors in its use of PDF); whereas the plain-vanilla Create!form product accepts standard ASCII output and supports the PostScript print data stream.

Documents enhanced with Create!form for JDE OneWorld are also output in the PDF format, with the main difference being that OneWorld user documents now bear the color graphics, logos, barcodes, and other features that Create!form International's software added to them.

With Create!form for JDE OneWorld 2.0, the company is giving its OneWorld customers the same types of enhancements that users of Create!form already have access to. Chief among the enhancements is a new GUI for the forms design software that lets users see exactly how their new document will look. The new GUI features a split screen, with the old OneWorld-generated PDF on one side of the screen and the new enhanced document on the other, eliminating the need to toggle back and forth between them. There's also a new tree-structure viewing capability that makes it easier for a forms designer to see the input and output field attributes and group sections coming from the OneWorld software.

Kurt Mueffelmann, Create!form International's president and chief executive, says these improvements will streamline the forms design process and cut the amount of time required to design a form by 50 percent. "Instead of typing in things, positioning values, hex values, with our tool, you just draw the box, click, and it's already mapped," he said. "The actual design [of the new forms] is exactly what they see."

Other new features with Create!form for JDE OneWorld 2.0 include improved capability to define document sets within projects, allowing better repagination controls; fixed sectional positioning for consistent output formatting; enhanced repagination that eliminates empty space, to reduce the number of pages in a document; support for PDF thumbnails; automated "1 of X" page numbering; section insertion (with or without source) for repeating sections, such as headers and footers; and support for double-byte character sets, such as those used by the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages.

The Create!form for JDE OneWorld product suite consists of a Windows PC design tool, called Create!form for JDE OneWorld (the same as the product suite), and the Windows 2000/NT merge engine, called Create!form. Optional modules include Create!send for JDE OneWorld, a job ticketing utility that installs on the OneWorld Enterprise server, and Create!form plug-in for JDE OneWorld, which enables Acrobat Reader to merge the custom form on a OneWorld client whenever a PDF report is viewed. Create!form for JDE OneWorld 2.0 has pre-built interfaces with Create!form International's entire suite of electronic document distribution modules, allowing delivery by fax and e-mail, as well as archiving and retrieval via Web browsers.

Create!form for JDE OneWorld 2.0 was beta-tested by several Create!form International customers, including Mizuno USA. Scott Grandfield, Mizuno's senior project manager, singled out the new GUI and tree-structure viewing capabilities in the new version as the most useful new features. His users had also been asking for the new "1-of-X" pagination feature. Mueffelmann says Create!form International has 1,100 customers who interface with J.D. Edwards software, about 320 of which use the Create!form for JDE OneWorld product.

Create!form for JDE OneWorld 2.0 is available now and supports J.D. Edwards OneWorld versions B73.2.2 (cum 2) SP14 or B73.3.3 (Xe) and above. Pricing starts at about $10,000 for the basic package. For more information, visit Create!form International's Web site.

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