News Briefs and Product Shorts

• New iSeries servers will be installed at Telecom Fiji over the next six months in order to run the island telephone company's new OS/400 billing system, Brocker Technology Group announced last week. Datec, the Fijian subsidiary of Edmonton, Alberta, based Brocker, will work with CSG Systems and IBM to install the Integrated Customer Management System, an OS/400-based billing systems for telecommunications companies, at Telecom Fiji. IBM sold the Integrated Customer Management System to CSG Systems, of Denver, Colorado, last month. Brocker, which employs more than 250 people, primarily in the business of delivering technology to telecommunications companies in Australia and the South Pacific Islands, estimates that the deal with Telecom Fiji, owner of the only public switched telephone network in the nation of 750,000 people, is worth about $3.8 million Fiji Dollars, or about $1.8 million U.S. Dollars.

• FormScape last week announced the introduction of new electronic forms software that comes bundled with 12 of the most commonly used forms used by companies using ERP software from J.D. Edwards. FormScape Express for J.D. Edwards is designed to get small and midsize J.D. Edwards users up and printing forms in a matter of hours, the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, company said. FormScape's forms server software, which runs on Windows and Unix servers, allows companies to repurpose the native print output from host systems, so it can be more easily manipulated and deployed in new ways, such as by e-mail or fax or over the Web. FormScape's form designer software also runs on Windows software. However, users of the FormScape Express for J.D. Edwards package won't have to design their new forms. The package ships with four standard accounts receivable forms (standard invoice, contract billing invoice, delinquency letters, and statement of account), four accounts payable forms (purchase order, request for quote, BACS remittance, and check remittance), and four dispatch and delivery forms (delivery note, pick slip, bill of lading, and loading note). The new software supports all platforms supported by J.D. Edwards' software, including Windows NT, OS/400, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris.
  
  
• Create!form International, the Waltham, Massachusetts, provider of electronic forms management software for OS/400 applications and other systems, last week announced support for double-byte character set (DBCS) and compliance with ERP 8.0 (the new name that J.D. Edwards gave to its OneWorld suite of enterprise software as part of its recent J.D. Edwards 5 rebranding). Create!form already counts more than 1,100 J.D. Edwards users among its customer base, and the latest round of tests and certifications, conducted by J.D. Edwards Global Advanced Technology Services in Denver, Colorado, looks to ensure that legacy. The addition of DBCS support allows Create!form's OS/400, Windows, and J.D. Edwards solutions to be displayed in Asian languages. Character-based languages, such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, require software programs to support two bytes of address spacing in order to support the thousands of different characters used in those languages. Western alphabets, on the other hand, require only a single byte to cover all of the letters and characters. The company plans to demonstrate its new DBCS capabilities during Quest Asia, the J.D. Edwards user group conference being held in Bangkok, Thailand, from October 9 to 11.
  
  
• NLynx Technologies last week announced the availability of new virtual private network (VPN) hardware and software solutions: the VPNLynx Connector and the VPNLynx Client. The VPNLynx Connector is a specialized version of the InterLynx/TS Firewall and VPN appliance, which the company recently announced as part of its reorganization. The VPNLynx Connector is designed for companies that already have routers and firewalls in place but lack VPN capability. It uses IP Security Protocol Working Group (IPSEC) and Triple Data Encryption Standard to encrypt data during sessions, and costs $895. The VPNLynx Client is software designed to allow mobile workers to connect to their company's server over a secure VPN line. It requires a VPNLynx controller to be installed at the corporate location and costs $110. For more information, go to www.nlynx.com.
  
  
• New York City-based clothes maker Jordache Enterprises is implementing business intelligence software from Satori Group, to begin pulling information from its AS/400 general ledger application to improve planning, reporting, and analysis tasks. Jordache, which generates $500 million a year from the sales of 30 million garments made in 16 factories around the world, looked at several competitive business intelligence offerings before settling on Satori Group's proCube software. The proCube software runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems and uses Microsoft Excel as the front-end user interface, which is fed through proCube's multidimensional database server, called the Xchange Server. Jordache plans to use proCube to slice and dice financial and operational data to produce income statements, balance sheets, trial balances, and consolidation and allocation reports.
  
  
• New software from Electronics For Imaging is designed to allow OS/400 and mainframe shops to partake of high-end color printing capabilities that EFI enables through its Fiery line of print servers. Last week the Foster City, California, hardware and software company announced its new Data Center Package, a software product that allows OS/400 and mainframes to connect to Fiery print controllers. EFI said its new software allows a single mainframe or OS/400 server to handle multiple PDF data streams, provides legacy application users with high-quality color printing capabilities, and widens the choice of digital output devices. EFI's print servers, such as its Fiery line, provide network capabilities to stand-alone printers and copiers, allowing their printing capabilities to be shared over the Internet.
  
  

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