Teachers and lunch quality are the big winners with changes made to the Food Service Program‘s school lunch program in the Midwest. As a result of a recent implementation of Cardiff Software‘s TELEform data capture and verification software, teachers will no longer have to manually enter information from their students’ meal order forms into the FSP’s OS/400-based application. In addition to increasing the quality of its data and processes, the FSP expects children to get better lunches, too.

The FSP is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1970 to provide affordable, convenient meals to children attending Catholic

Business Computer Design Int’l is a company with a lot going on. Next week the Chicago software distributor will announce the general availability of its new iSeries Web application development environment, ProGen WebSmart 4.0, which will quickly be followed by new versions of its Nexus portal and Catapult report distribution software. In fact, the company is working to combine the three applications to provide a single software stack to meet much of the Web needs of the average OS/400 shop.

The Version 4.0 release of WebSmart marks the maturation of a popular alternative to IBM‘s WebSphere Web application server.

Collecting signatures has long been a thorn in the sides of IT managers struggling to reduce paper use. While forms software has digitized pre-printed forms, and electronic fax and e-mail add-ons distribute those forms over phone lines, getting that good old John Hancock has remained a barrier to eliminating paper entirely. Among several other enhancements in the new version of Integrated Custom Software‘s FormSprint OS/400 document management software is support for Topaz Systems‘ electronic signature pads.

ICS has formed a partnership with Topaz Systems to enable its FormSprint software to work with Topaz’s line of electronic signature capture

OS/400 shops looking to modernize their 5250 applications with Microsoft‘s .NET technologies may want to check out the latest release of WRQ‘s Verastream integration software. With the general availability of Verastream Version 5.5, which WRQ announced last week, the Seattle company delivered support for Microsoft’s BizTalk Server 2004, as well as closer integration with Visual Studio .NET. WRQ and Verastream also received kudos for leadership in the market for programmatic application modernization tools by IT analyst Gartner.

Verastream allows companies to build Java or .NET wrappers around existing host application datastreams, such as 5250 or 3270, thereby