Linoma Bolsters Surveyor/400 with Excel Capabilities, SSL

February 23, 2010 Alex Woodie

Linoma Software last week launched a new release of Surveyor/400, its “Swiss Army knife” i/OS utility that allows users to do everything from browsing DB2/400 records and editing stored procedures, to building custom reports and converting spool files to PDF. With the new version 3.7 release of Surveyor/400, Linoma has added new integration methods with Microsoft Excel, as well as support for SSL encryption to System i hosts.

The list of things you can do with Surveyor/400–a lightweight Java program with a graphical interface–is extremely long, hence the commonly used “Swiss Army knife” and “do everything” labels. Depending on the user’s role–be it programmer, administrator, or end-user–Surveyor/400 can offer a range of useful capabilities.

Power users that often find themselves working with DB2/400 data in Excel spreadsheets will be happy to hear the Linoma product supports the new Excel 2007 spreadsheet software, which offers a range of information-manipulation capabilities (as well as that spiffy “ribbon” interface).

Version 3.7 also brings new Excel formatting capabilities that will allow users to create more polished-looking spreadsheets from System i data. Namely, the new release gives users the capability to automatically specify a range of options when exporting data from the System i, including title, spreadsheet name, autosize columns, and the font used in the title, headings, and data portions of a spreadsheet.

This release adds the capability to import Excel 2007 spreadsheets into database files on the System i, which will likely prove a handy feature for i/OS shops with extensive investments in, and usage of, Excel spreadsheets (which is probably most of them). Linoma provides users with graphical data mapping wizards to simplify the process of uploading data from Excel 07 to DB2/400.

Linoma also added support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption when connecting to a System i host. SSL will provide another layer of security when handling sensitive business information with Surveyor/400, and help organizations comply with regulatory requirements governing security. SSL support is provided across many Surveyor/400 functions, including executing queries, editing files, transferring files, and 5250 emulation. (Surveyor/400 also includes a built-in 5250 emulator in its laundry-list of functions and capabilities.)

The new SSL support augments existing Surveyor/400 security capabilities, including the capability for administrators to restrict user access to specific libraries, files, fields, records, subrecords, and objects on System i servers, which was added with Surveyor/400 version 3.0 in 2005.

While Linoma often touted the performance and sub-second response time of Surveyor/400 (a hedge, as it were, against users’ long-standing bias for green-screen computing and against anything graphical, let alone Java), it has take steps to improve performance further with version 3.7. To that end, Linoma adopted the Java Virtual Machine version 1.6 with the new release.

A number of other enhancements and fixes made it into this release, including: the capability to work with spooled files from output queue properties; the capability to use null parameters in the execution of stored procedures; the capability to delete triggers; the capability to cancel the Web Update function; among many other features that can be viewed at http://www.linomasoftware.com/products/surveyor/whatsnew.

Surveyor/400 version 3.7 is available now. The software supports IBM i 6.1 and older versions of the operating system. Pricing is unchanged, and starts at $995 for a P05 server with an unlimited number of users. For more information, see www.linomasoftware.com.