Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

RJS Software Systems is rolling out a new imaging utility that it hopes will attract small and midsized OS/400 shops that have avoided implementing imaging technology due to high costs. Image Server/400, announced during the recent COMMON conference in Denver, allows organizations to store scanned images in an OS/400 database and deliver them to users through a Web browser. With a price tag in the $10,000 range, RJS has positioned Image Server/400 well below the traditional cost for imaging products.

RJS is a relatively small, privately held software company in Burnsville, Minnesota, that until recently has focused on developing a range of spool file, report splitter, and print protocol conversion utilities for the OS/400 platform, as well as providing custom solutions for its customers through services agreements. The company expanded its target market earlier this year, after announcing the first of its productivity tools, an application called the iSeries Office Integration Bundle, which it intended to function as a replacement for IBM's OfficeVision/400.

Now RJS is continuing to expand its product coverage with Image Server/400, a document management system designed for electronically publishing almost any kind of document. Image Server/400 includes two components. The first, which runs on a Windows PC, captures images from Twain-compatible scanners and sends them to the Integrated File System (IFS) on an OS/400 server. This Windows-based scanning interface also allows up to 10 user-defined keys to be associated with the document for faster retrieval and access times. The software also gives users the capability to directly import PC documents, such as Microsoft Word and Excel files, into the application.

Once the documents are on the OS/400 server, Image Server/400 works with the platform's Web servers--either the older HTTP Server or the newer Apache server--to deliver access to the documents through any Web browser. Users can locate documents by looking through folders or using its search function, or they can use the user-defined key, set during the document check-in process, to pull the document up even faster. For long-term storage or to free space on OS/400 disk drives, Image Server/400 supports the migration of documents to network attached storage systems running on any platform, optical disks, compact discs, or remote FTP sites. Other features include compression, encryption, and integration with 5250 applications via the iSeries Office Integration Bundle API, the company said.

RJS says Image Server/400 provides a more modern document imaging system for less money than older systems, including IBM's Content Manager and several other well-known third-party vendors. Advantages over those applications include use of IBM's integrated Web servers for the OS/400 platform, support for network attached storage servers, and compatibility with modern scanning standards, the company said. RJS is currently working on building new technologies, such as support for optical character recognition technology, into future releases, said Richard Schoen, a company spokesperson.

Image Server/400 should be generally available by the end of November. Licenses for the software, which requires OS/400 V4R2 or later, will cost $10,000 per server, and will not be tiered or require any client charge. For more information, go to www.rjssoftware.com.

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How the City of Pinellas Park, FL is saving
$2.25 million using ASNA Visual RPG:

The City Pinellas Park's police officers have used laptop computers in their cruisers to enter case report information since 1991. Originally, the reports were entered on the laptops in their vehicles and later when officers went back to the station, the reports were then uploaded into the Records Management System on an AS/400. However, this was very time-consuming because uploading data from laptops to the AS/400 was extremely slow and officers were spending too much time in the station uploading these reports.

As a solution, the Pinellas Park Police Department used ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) to take advantage of their team's RPG skills and to develop user-friendly Windows applications that were deployed in the police cruisers along with a wireless network. The ease of using these new AVR-developed applications saves officers time because they can upload data, via the wireless network, from their cruisers directly to the AS/400 with the speed of record-level access. Because the officers can do this directly from their vehicles instead of at the police station, they can now spend more time on the street and less time at the station uploading reports.

Pinellas Park spent roughly $15,000 on the cost of development time and by using this new AVR-developed application, they have projected an annual savings of $225,000 by having the ability to keep their officers on the street. This means the police department will conceivably save $2.25 million over the 10-year period that the application is in use.

"The use of AVR has increased our efficiency and functionality, we are now saving the equivalent of salaries for five full-time police officers per year."
-- Jim Shanks

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