Spool File Distribution Gets Smarter with New inFORM Tool
May 12, 2009 Dan Burger
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Electronic documents and the paperless office make a lot of sense as companies focus on ways to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. Certainly there have been advancements in the technology and there have been success stories touting excellent return on investments. One area of advancement is document distribution, and one vendor with something new to say in this area is inFORM Decisions, a company that just introduced iDocs SmartRouter to its electronic documents suite of products. SmartRouter was designed to improve the processing and distribution of individual spool file pages. It’s a standalone software module that offers testing and filtering options for reports and business forms and allows users to direct or re-direct output, burst, sort, and group reports and forms based on spool file attributes and/or spool file content. SmartRouter is not an easy product to describe or appreciate at the surface level, says Dan Forester, president of inFORM Decisions. But the tool, in his opinion, has great potential for precisely controlling spool file distribution. “Our tech staff can now more easily implement previously complex, document or report distribution applications,” Forester says. “Most important, we can now offer a type of document control that, quite frankly, has cost us lost opportunities in the past.” The capability to select specific spool file pages and direct them to specific targets means the barrier of spool file attributes can be overridden and individual pages of reports or business forms may be burst, sorted, grouped, bundled, and ultimately directed to a target, and after that, redirected again. In addition to spool file bursting and sorting, the resulting pages can be routed into inFORM’s iDocs Suite of products and then merged with business form graphics, converted to PDFs, e-mailed, faxed, and/or stored in inFORM’s iView Web-based archive retrieval solution. The inFORM iDocs Suite of products runs native on the IBM i. Forster has been promoting electronic documents as green technology and during an interview with IT Jungle at the COMMON 2009 Annual Meeting and Expo in Reno, Nevada, two weeks ago, he noted that the goals of inFORM’s clients with regard to moving toward a paperless office coincides with broader efforts to protect threatened forests. inFORM Decisions has a Website called the IFD Green Page that describes the company’s commitment and the specific corporate and employee actions taken at IFD that are pro environment. Forster also said that IFD profits exceeded expectation by eight percent during 2008 and that the improvement was, to a large degree, attributable to a 15 percent reduction in operating costs. “The lower operating costs grew strictly out of improved business operations stemming from a variety of activities including our switch to virtual offices, VoIP phones, and the utilization of Internet-based software services,” Forster said. No reductions in staff played a part in the reduced operating costs. RELATED STORIES inFORM Commits to Reforestation Through Arbor Day Program Companies Slow to Kick Paper Habit, But E-Docs Making the ROI Case inFORM Helps Save the Earth with Updates to i-Based Document Management
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