Work sometimes played second fiddle to games at Simkins Industries, a Connecticut manufacturer of packing materials. “In one facility, we had a group of employees playing poker at lunch,” says John Liversidge, the company’s IT manager. “When it was time to return to work, they simply handed off their timecards and were punched in by a fellow employee, so they could continue their game.” With 14 new HandPunch terminals connected to an OS/400-based payroll system, the days of buddy punching at Simkins are over.

Simkins Industries was founded in 1901 as the New Haven Pulp and Paper Company. Today the

If you still think your OS/400 server is immune to Windows viruses, think again. The MyDoom.F strain wreaked havoc at one OS/400 shop last week, when the worm deleted 25,000 Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and image files that the company had kept on the IFS portion of its iSeries server. Faced with an extensive downtime and disaster recovery process, this company wished it had sought protection sooner.

MyDoom.F is the latest variant of the MyDoom worm, which was released in January and quickly became the most widespread Windows virus to date, according to some security researchers. Unlike the original MyDoom

In the world of authentication technology, single sign on (SSO) is considered the big prize at the end of a dark tunnel. Employees are happier when they don’t have oodles of user IDs and passwords to remember, and IT assets are, in the end, more secure. There are more than a dozen software vendors pushing enterprise SSO today, and many of them, such as industry leader Passlogix, have happy OS/400 customers.

Passlogix is a New York City-based developer of enterprise SSO solutions (as opposed to Web-based SSO). Over the last seven years, the company’s v-GO SSO product has attracted

The market for radio frequency identification (RFID) technology received another boost last month, when retailer Target followed Wal-Mart’s lead in requiring its largest suppliers to start using RFID tags next year. PeopleSoft also announced an expanded partnership with Data Systems International to develop RFID solutions for the PeopleSoft Enterprise and EnterpriseOne (formerly J.D. Edwards OneWorld) ERP applications, which will ship this quarter.

Two weeks ago Target’s chief information officer, Paul Singer, sent a letter to the company’s suppliers informing them of the new RFID requirement. The Minneapolis, Minnesota, company, which is the fourth largest retailer in the United States behind