Krengel Technology is currently offering 20 hours of free custom development to IBM i shops that reject the free UPS shipping program called WorldShip, and implement its IBM i-based Krengelship instead. Considering the UPS product is free, and Krengelship costs thousands of dollars, one wonders whether this offer really holds water. But as the adoption of Krengelship by logistics business Jacobson Companies shows, there are other costs to consider besides licensing.

WorldShip is UPS’ high-end shipping software for organizations with a large volume of shipments or pickups with UPS (or at least 25 per day, according to the company). The

Businesses and residents of New Orleans learned lessons about disaster preparedness and recovery the hard way from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. One of the companies impacted by the storm was Stewart Enterprises, one of the country’s largest operators of funeral homes and private cemeteries, which had several properties submerged by flood waters. After the company recovered, it took steps to overhaul how it prepares for future disasters.

Stewart Enterprises owns and operates 219 funeral homes and 140 cemeteries in 24 states. The 102-year-old company, which is headquartered near New Orleans and publicly traded on Nasdaq, has about 5,000 employees and

ProData Computer Services last month unveiled version 10 of DBU, its widely used Database Utility for IBM i servers. With this release, users automatically get two plug-ins that were previously priced separately, including the remote database access tool that enables users to access SQL Server, Oracle, and other databases from DBU screens and the JD Edwards database access plug-in. The company also recently shipped version 4 of RDR, its Retrieve Deleted Records software.

DBU is a popular utility that makes it easy for programmers, administrators, and users to view and access any file in DB2/400, without programming. The software is

In today’s highly regulated business environment, organizations are increasingly required to restrict access to data, and to track any changes that users make to the database. From time to time, activity that is unusual but nonetheless authorized will be flagged as suspicious. Last week, Kisco Information Systems unveiled a new release of its IBM i data auditing tool, iFileAudit, that makes it easier to deal with these types of situations.

iFileAudit is a handy database auditing tool designed to provide a complete trail of changes made to data in DB2/400, at the field, record, and file levels. The product, which

Synergivity Software, the U.S. distributor of Midrange Dynamics‘ change management software for IBM i, has begun work on a new product that will allow administrators to create menu screens on the IBM i server. The green-screen software, which doesn’t have a name as yet, will be easy enough for non-technical people to use, company officials say.

Synergivity’s new menu system would give customers the ability to control what options appear on users’ screens, and what commands they can issue from screens. In this respect, it will boost security, since users will not have the option to access sensitive

MuleSoft recently announced a new release of Mule ESB, its Java-based, open source enterprise service bus (ESB) that’s available in a free community edition and a for-fee enterprise edition. With the launch of Mule ESB 3.3, the enterprise edition gains a new capability called DataMapper that’s designed to allow users to create transformation and process flows in a visual, drag-and-drop environment.

Mule ESB Community is a freely downloadable ESB framework designed to manage and orchestrate the flow of data across multiple applications, protocols, and transportation mechanisms. The software is primarily designed for organizations that have somewhat complex application integration challenges,

Checking in to a hotel that uses Infor‘s Hotel Management System (HMS) should be a more pleasant experience thanks to a new iPad interface designed to work with Infor10 HMS. Infor also announced that a California dairy products company has licensed its Lawson M3 software, which it plans to run on IBM i gear.

The new iPad app, called Infor10 HMS Check-In, should streamline the check-in and check-out process for guests of hotels that run the Infor10 HMS, which Infor obtained with the $80 million acquisition of SoftBrands in 2009.

Infor says many check-in activities will now take

DocPath has been ramping up its campaign to convince disgruntled users of IBM‘s InfoPrint Designer software to sign up with DocPath as a way to keep their IBM i-resident document management environment relevant. Its latest tactic involves Windows 7, which DocPath says it can support with its solution for InfoPrint Designer users.

DocPath first landed on the IT Jungle radar earlier this year, when the Spanish company made an appearance at the COMMON conference in Southern California. Company representatives at the show were adamant that it would aggressively pursue what it considers a sizable continent of InfoPrint Designer

Townsend Security announced last week that its Alliance Key Manager hardware security module (HSM) has been added to the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule, enabling the encryption module to be used by federal government agencies.

Alliance Key Manager is an encryption key management solution that Townsend unveiled in late 2008 and shipped in early 2010. The product is designed to help organizations create, distribute, archive, and manage the 128-, 192-, and 256-bit symmetric AES keys that allow them to encrypt and decrypt their data as it sits in various applications and databases, including DB2/400, DB2 for LUW, Microsoft SQL

Web applications developed with the latest iteration of the m-Power tool from mrc will be more secure, more scalable, and better performing as a result of the new support for the latest release of the Tomcat Web application server in m-Power, the vendor says.

Apache Tomcat is a pure Java HTTP server designed around Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies. The open source product is bundled into m-Power, making it an easy deployment choice for m-Power customers–many of whom are IBM i shops–although they can use any Java-based Web application server of their choosing.

Tomcat version 7 was released