The IT folks at Discount Tire were not looking forward to rolling out the new Dell Optiplex point-of-sale systems last year. With close to 3,000 POS systems to replace, at more than 500 retail locations, the migration would probably still be underway if Discount Tire had used its biped-based “sneakernet.” Instead, the company used a software package called iCommand, from Symantec, to automate the roll-out, and finished the job, in January, within five weeks.

Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Discount Tire Company is the largest independent tire dealer in the United States, and it’s growing. The company employs 8,415 people,

MKS has delivered enhancements to Implementer, its OS/400 software configuration management (SCM) system, that it says will help companies provide greater transparency into business process changes, as required by government mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Software developers are rarely the ones who must justify to management and shareholders the changes being made to core applications. But before Implementer Version 5.5, non-technical decision makers lacked the appropriate tools to help them understand changes at a business process level, and then deploy them.

Marty Acks, the iSeries product manager for MKS, says developers and business managers have radically different views of

Magic Software made its first move into the burgeoning market for radio frequency identification (RFID) technology last week. Magic officials provided a high-level view of how its integration software, called iBOLT, will be used to glue events captured by RFID readers with ERP and “legacy” OS/400 applications. Meanwhile, IBM upped the RFID ante with its acquisition of Trigo Technologies, for an undisclosed sum.

Wal-Mart created this buzz about RFID last year, when it told suppliers they would need to start putting electronic chips, called RFID or EPC tags, onto shipments starting January 1, 2005. Several Wal-Mart competitors, including Target

Companies gained the option of converting OS/400 spool file output into RTF, XML, and the native Excel XLS format with the newest version of DRV Technologies‘ SpoolFlex. Last week the Atlanta company announced the immediate availability of SpoolFlex Version 3.0, which, in addition to the new supported formats, features a new OS/400-based address book for frequently used e-mail addresses and fax numbers.

SpoolFlex is a collection of native OS/400 utilities designed to eliminate the time and expense associated with printing and hand-delivering OS/400 reports, and to reduce errors introduced when financial data is rekeyed into Excel spreadsheets.

The basic