BCD Spruces Up Web and Doc Management Tools

June 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

WebSmart customers will find a few new features aimed at programmer productivity in the version 10.2 release, which BCD Software unveiled at the recent COMMON conference in Florida. The Chicago subsidiary of Quadrant Software also updated its Catapult and Nexus Portal tools.

WebSmart 10.2 brings several features that will appeal to RPG or PHP programmers; the product, you will remember, is available in both ILE and PHP versions to fit the needs of both types of customers.

For starters, the WebSmart IDE now highlights matching parentheses and braces, which will make it easier for programmers to find and fix coding errors. Support for file-level repository extensions is another programmer aid, while support for base64 encoding in the ILE version will enable the product to work with more data types.

The new “rplstr” option in the ILE version gives programmers the power to control whether find and replace parameters should be trimmed. Finally, the WebSmart PHP debugger settings have been added to the options menu, which should make it easier to configure in single-user and multi-user environments.

BCD’s Catapult report and document distribution tool has also been updated. The big news with version 7.9 is the capability for the Windows-based component of the product to run on Microsoft‘s Azure cloud platform. This will eliminate the need for IBM i shops to buy and configure an on-premise Windows server to run the poller component of the product.

Catapult 7.9 also brings several new options, including the capability to automatically notify a person when a rule fails. There’s also an option that attempts to reconnect Catapult at regular intervals when a connection fails. And when Catapult is splitting reports, the product now includes an option to combine links into a single email.

Nexus Portal, BCD’s secure enterprise content management (ECM) platform, which runs natively on IBM i, is also getting new features with the latest 4.08 and 4.09 releases. By default, the ECM will now open newly added documents in a new window, which should improve the way users interact with the program. The ECM document tree now loads faster, BCD says.

Administrators will also appreciate the new capability to specify IP addresses along with the LDAP server name. Nexus has supported LDAP for authentication since version 4 debuted in 2011. The product also supports the OpenLDAP and Microsoft Active Directory standards.