RPG Programmer Takes Company to Windows and the Web
by Roger Pence

How does a growing company maintain a reasonable level of customer service when many of its business processes are rooted in manual procedures? In just 10 years of operation, SierraPine has become North America's third-largest producer of composite-panel building materials. (For you weekend fixer-uppers, that's lumber-speak for particle board and MDF, or medium density fiberboard). SierraPine manufactures building materials panels for many of the leading mills and lumber suppliers in the country, with distributors in nearly all 50 states. READ MORE >

Tangent Porting Fingerprint Engine to OS/400
by Alex Woodie

Sometime next year, the OS/400 platform could get its first biometric fingerprint-recognition application. Tangent Solutions, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, company that writes software for the financial services industry, is working with IBM's Rochester labs to port Security First's Ethentica Biometric Trust Engine from Linux to OS/400. Though the port is in its early stages, Tangent is excited about the prospect of bringing the software to what it considers to be the most secure operating system in the industry. READ MORE >

Tango/04 Ships iSeries Security Agent
by Alex Woodie

Tango/04 Computing Group, the Spanish software company that makes systems management utilities for OS/400 and Windows operating systems, last week announce its first OS/400 security software product. Its new iSeries Security Agent works with its flagship systems management product, VISUAL Message Center, to monitor internal activity occurring on OS/400 servers and to automatically take action against suspicious system activity before it's too late. READ MORE >

Manhattan Rounds Out PkMS with New Billing Module
by Alex Woodie

New software from Manhattan Associates should make it easier for companies in the third-party logistics (3PL) industry to more accurately handle billing for multiple clients. PkCost, announced last week, builds on Manhattan's popular OS/400-based warehouse management application, PkMS, by adding new storage billing and invoice management capabilities, giving 3PL companies a better way to track services and bill their clients for inventory handling, storage, fulfillment, and transportation activities. READ MORE >

Create!form Updates Forms Software for J.D. Edwards
by Alex Woodie

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. READ MORE >

News Briefs and Product Shorts

Krispy Kreme Secret Ingredient Exposed . . . Bass Pro Shops Lures Shoppers with Quality Data . . . Jamaican Manufacturer Goes Online with LANSA . . . BRAIN Marches On Despite Tough Time . . . Forrester Finds CRM Is All That, All Over Again . . . New iSeries Developer's Kit Tackles iSCSI Protocol . . . READ MORE >

Reader Feedback and Insights

We value your feedback and insights on the OS/400 market. Feel free to drop us a letter to the editor, and we will post it in a reader feedback column for this newsletter. READ MORE >