One of the new features iSeries shops can look forward to in OS/400 V5R3 is the capability to detect and clean viruses at the moment a user attempts to open a file that’s been infected with a virus, or the file is otherwise accessed. This so-called “on access” virus scanning capability will debut with OS/400 V5R3, which IBM is preparing to announce. On-access scanning will require an OS/400 antivirus scanning engine, such as Bytware‘s StandGuard Anti-Virus.

Bytware launched the industry’s first–and still the only–OS/400-based virus scanning and removal tool in the summer of 2003 (see “Bytware Launches OS/400 Antivirus

Annie Powell’s real estate taxes were due. The county tax assessor’s office was just outside of Richmond, Virginia, so on her lunch break she sped there to pay them. When she arrived, eight people were lined up in front of her. Sullen, she got in her car and returned to work. What Powell didn’t know was that two developers for a municipal software house in nearby Jonesborough, Tennessee, had just started a project that would have let Powell pay her taxes online.

For 20 years, software developer BAI Municipal Software has written RPG-based applications to manage revenue-centric activities for municipalities,

OS/400 shops looking to Expand Networks to alleviate bandwidth problems with their data replication environments have new options available from the Roseland, New Jersey, company. Yesterday, Expand announced a new modular architecture that includes specific plug-ins designed to speed certain types of traffic. The company is also packaging its IP accelerations capabilities as a software product for the first time and has launched new appliances.

Several OS/400 shops have reported exceptional compression rates–up to 500 percent and higher–on the 5250 datastreams of their high availability environments using Expand Networks’ line of IP Accelerators. The news led to the formation of

One of the software vendors now writing OS/400 communications software for newer transaction protocols, such as the AS2 standard used for sending EDI documents over the Internet, is Cleo Communications. The established emulation and communication tools vendor from Loves Park, Illinois, entered the OS/400 software market last March, with Version 2.1 of its LexiCom AS2 software. Last week, Cleo updated the technology underlying LexiCom, which it calls VersaLex, with several new automation features.

Cleo’s LexiCom AS/400 software extends traditional EDI systems to the Internet by enabling users to send and receive documents, such as purchase orders or advanced shipping