CYBRA Updates MarkMagic for i 6.1

September 16, 2008 Alex Woodie

CYBRA last week announced MarkMagic version 6.5, a new release of its package of software for creating and consuming barcodes and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in an AS/400 environment. With the new release, CYBRA is now supporting IBM i 6.1, the operating system formerly known as i5/OS V6R1.

MarkMagic version 6.5 is largely based on the last major release of the product, version 6.1, which CYBRA announced about 10 months ago. Besides support for i 6.1, the only other major feature mentioned by CYBRA was the inclusion of the new Print Manager functionality, which gives users more options over how MarkMagic sends jobs to printers. However, Print Manager was included with version 6.1, so it’s not really a new feature.

The major change with version 6.5 is support for i 6.1, which is not a trivial matter. Many software vendors have run into trouble with the new operating system, which introduced several significant changes in how applications must be programmed to access server resources.

CYBRA did not share how much work went into supporting i 6.1, but it assures users that it will work as advertised on the new operating system. “Existing MarkMagic customers who adopt the new i5/OS release can migrate immediately with full confidence that all labels, forms, and print jobs created on MarkMagic for earlier versions of the operating system will transfer without any conversion effort on the customer’s part,” the company states in a press release.

To date, nearly 370 applications have been certified by IBM to run on i 6.1, according to IBM’s Global Solutions Directory, where you can search for certified solutions across all of IBM’s operating systems.