IBM i software juggernaut Infor yesterday unveiled Electronic Banking for System i, a new application designed to automate a company’s inbound and output payments, as well as provide bank statement reconciliation with a customer’s books. The Java-based product, which was developed by the Irish software company Cashbook, has been in use by many System i shops for some time, and will now be sold and supported directly by Infor.

Electronic Banking for System i provides three core electronic banking functions for its BPCS, MAPICS, and System 21 customers, according to Kari Miller, Infor’s director of product development for System

Sometimes the search for a particular solution can lead to unexpected benefits in other areas. This was the case at GreenBank, a Tennessee financial firm that was looking for a way to encrypt the tape backups from its IBM i5/OS server. When the company’s IT manager realized that he could get encryption and, at the same time, eliminate GreenBank’s reliance on tape-based backups by adopting a disk-based virtual tape library (VTL) from Crossroads Systems, it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

GreenBank provides loans and other financial services to people and businesses through 65 branches in eastern

SystemObjects, a French company that makes development tools for the IBM i platform, recently announced Business4Mobile, a collection of new development tools for creating applications that run on the new generation of smart mobile devices and access data residing on the System i, among other database servers.

Business4Mobile provides a pre-built framework for accessing pre-defined queries from a database. Upon logging into the Business4Mobile application from a smartphone, a user is prompted to choose from a list of available folders, which contain links to the queries. Depending on the users’ needs, the administrator can make queries available that relate

IBM last week announced that its flagship e-commerce software package, WebSphere Commerce version 7.0, will now run natively on the IBM i 6.1 and 7.1 operating systems. The move offers IBM i customers three new e-commerce product options for hosting business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce websites on their System i or Power Systems servers.

WebSphere Commerce is a respected family of products that allows companies of all sizes to set up and manage their own customized e-commerce storefronts on the World Wide Web. The software, which has received kudos from Gartner and AMR Research, comes with pre-packaged and

The forthcoming release of Agilysys‘ new Guest360 property management system on Microsoft‘s Azure cloud computing platform was made possible in part through development tools from Surround Technologies. And while SurroundTech’s Accelerator products are being used on the Windows platform in this case, there’s nothing stopping users from doing similar things with the IBM i platform.

Surround Technologies is a New Jersey software firm that creates programming tools aimed at simplifying development, primarily in Windows and IBM i environments. Its flagship Accelerator product handles much of the low-level grunt work that goes into writing sophisticated applications and interfaces,

IBM last week unveiled Systems Director Editions for Power Systems version 6.2, an updated collection of software for monitoring and provisioning physical and virtual Power Systems server infrastructure.

The “Editions” component of the name refers to the three versions of Systems Director 6.2 that IBM is making available for the Power Systems platforms, including Express, Standard, and Enterprise editions. Each has been updated to include the latest components that IBM includes in the Systems Director package components, including core Systems Director functionality, Active Energy Manager, VMControl, Network Control, Tivoli Monitoring Agents for System p, and DB2 Enterprise Server Edition.

New

Users of Jinfonet Software‘s JReport business intelligence reporting tool gain new ways to explore data with the latest version 10 release. Unveiled last week, JReport 10 includes a new Web-based report viewer that makes it easier for users to get pertinent information by filtering data and slicing and dicing reports. Overall, the improvements make for a more visual and interactive online reporting experience, the Maryland company says.

JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that runs on any Java-based Web application server, and is typically utilized as an embedded reporting tool for other Web applications. The suite

Gamma Software Inc. (GSI), an IBM i business partner based in Oregon, recently launched Maintenance Scheduling System (MSS), a new RPG-based application designed to help companies manage and automate the equipment maintenancetasks involved in the maintenance of equipment.

MSS ensures that maintenance is completed by automatically generating work orders for equipment based on preset factors, such as a certain number of miles, hours, or days of use. Each work order can support up to 999 tasks, and each task can have an unlimited number of instructions, according to GSI.

The software tracks the cost of maintaining equipment according to labor

The folks at Masters Gallery Foods don’t have to worry about forgotten passwords as much now that the company has deployed PistolStar‘s Password Power software to govern access to its iSeries server. Masters was among four new customers the New Hampshire software company recently touted.

Masters Gallery Foods is a Wisconsin-based cheese packaging company. The 300-person company bags and ships all types of cheese products made by its suppliers, ranging from small 4 ounce retail “shreds” up to 640-pound blocks of American style cheese (plus soft Italian style cheese for industrial use).

Like many companies in the food business,

Wynne Systems recently unveiled RentalMan version XI, the latest release of its IBM i-based suite of ERP software for companies in the equipment rental industry.

RentalMan, which was first released in 1993, is the premiere suite of i-based accounting software for companies in the equipment rental and sales business. The suite comes fully integrated with rental, sales, analysis, AR/AP, general ledger, purchasing, and equipment maintenance components, and is used by companies such as United Rentals, RSC, Hertz Equipment Rentals, and Sunbelt Rentals.

The Irvine, California-based company says the 11th release of RentalMan represents a “significant enhancement” over previous releases. In