Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

OS/400 document management received a boost this month from photo and imaging giant Konica and Belgium software developer Inventive Designers. Konica's new DocuBreeze offering is an any-to-any document router that supports complex business processes, as well as iSeries data. Inventive Designers, meanwhile, announced the release of Scriptura 2.0, its XML-based document design and output management tool, which features new OS/400-specific commands.

Konica, through its subsidiary Konica Business Technologies, based in Windsor, Connecticut, announced a new software application called DocuBreeze earlier this month. DocuBreeze lets users collect files from virtually any source and process the files in a variety of ways, according to workflow rules, then distribute them over a network. All this, from a Web browser, the company says.

DocuBreeze, which starts at $5,000 for 1,000 users, automatically retrieve documents or files from a variety of sources such as Konica multifunctional devices, e-mail clients, FTP servers, or shared Windows files. It is then capable of performing a number of advanced processes on them, including moving them to any destination, converting the files, resizing them, and many more. The software supports optical character recognition and barcoding to help route documents.

The product's capabilities are segmented by package. DocuBreeze Standard Edition supports image processing, concurrent job processes, collection of documents or files from two Konica multifunctional devices, distribution to all Konica multifunctional devices and Windows shares, and has a built-in task scheduler.

The next step up, DocuBreeze Advanced, includes all of the capabilities found in the Standard Edition, including more processing power and support for FTP sites as well as Konica multifunctional devices and Windows shares. DocuBreeze Advanced also features support for "Bates stamping," which is used to track case numbers in law offices.

The top-of-the-line Premier Edition of Docubreeze is designed for companies with complex document-processing requirements. It features even more processing power than the Advanced Edition, as well as support for barcode routing, archival/retrieval, and the capability to collect documents from, and distribute them to, OS/400, Windows, Unix, Linux, and mainframe servers.

Inventive Designers introduced its Scriptura document design and distribution tool just over a year ago. The software uses XML technology to build templates into which companies can add personalized information from their databases (including DB2/400). The PC-based WYSIWYG Scriptura design tool lets users drag and drop their page elements, such as lines, tables, and barcodes, onto the page, while a wizard helps them pull data from JDBC-compliant databases. At runtime, the Java distribution engine distributes the document in XML, PDF, XHTML, or PCL formats.

With Scriptura Version 2.0, there are a number of new capabilities, including multilingual capabilities, a new Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based interface, and support for multiple columns, virtual page lengths, and other page count and insert capabilities.

The product's new multilingual capability lets Scriptura automatically change how data appears in a document, based on the customs for that locale. Different parts of the world use currency, decimal separators, and date/time identifiers in different ways; now Scriptura lets users specify the correct format for each locale.

The new SOAP interface will make it easier to use Scriptura in a Web services environment. The company says the SOAP service can be used with an existing Web application server, such as WebSphere or Tomcat, or with the no-frills Web application server that ships with Scriptura.

A number of pagination and layout improvements have been made with Scriptura 2.0, including support for newspaper-style multiple columns. The software also now supports virtual page lengths, to split content over a number of pages, or a new forced page count feature, which will add blank pages to the end of a sequence, in order to more easily print in duplex mode.

Scriptura 2.0 also debuts several handy iSeries specific features, the company says. With this release, customers can use native CL commands to instruct the Scriptura Engine to automatically create specified documents.

Scriptura 2.0 is available now. Pricing per user for the Scriptura Designer is 1,995 euros (or about $2,290 at current exchange rates). To download a free trial version of Scriptura, go to www.scriptura-xsl.com.