• PeopleSoft Relents, Agrees to Oracle Acquisition

  December 14, 2004 Alex Woodie

  After a bitter 18-month battle, PeopleSoft‘s board of directors agreed today to be acquired by Oracle for $26.50 per share, or $10.3 billion. While the agreement will end an extremely unpleasant period for the companies and their customers, it raises new questions about the future of some of PeopleSoft’s products, particularly the World ERP line, which runs only on IBM iSeries servers and is heavily relied upon by thousands of companies across the world. The merger agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and should close by early January. As part of the deal,

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• Kisco Introduces New CFINT Buster

  December 14, 2004 Alex Woodie

  OS/400 shops looking to get the most 5250 performance out of their boxes may want to check out Kisco Information Systems‘ new GoFaster product, which the company introduced last week. Kisco says that GoFaster implements a simple software change that overcomes the CFINT interactive governor to allow users to access the full power of their OS/400 server for 5250 sessions. The software was developed in Europe and is now available in the United States for the first time through Kisco. IBM didn’t entirely eliminate the 5250 interactive governor with the new iSeries packaging it introduced in January 2003, but

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• iSeries CRM Boosts Service Level At Sons of Norway

  December 14, 2004 Alex Woodie

  A new CRM system is paying dividends at Sons of Norway. By integrating Touchtone‘s Wintouch eCRM system with its OS/400 membership database, the Minneapolis organization has given its members Web-based self-service and has made its office staff’s job easier at the same time. Wintouch users like Sons of Norway will also benefit from new workflow enhancements Touchtone included in Wintouch eCRM Version 6.3, which was released last month. Sons of Norway is a 109-year-old organization dedicated to the preservation of Norwegian and Scandinavian culture. It operates 420 lodges, publishes Viking Magazine and the Sons of Norway Web site,

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• Centerfield Addresses Compliance with delta/TRACKER

  December 14, 2004 Alex Woodie

  Centerfield Technology is rolling out new OS/400 software called delta/TRACKER, which is intended to help administrators keep track of changes made to their systems over long periods of time and to prepare for regulatory compliance audits. The promising plug-in for iSeries Navigator already features 41 different pre-configured reports, which cost only $60 each, and Centerfield wants your ideas for more reports that it can build into the product. As a plug-in for IBM‘s iSeries Navigator GUI systems management product, Centerfield’s new delta/TRACKER product sends agents to the iSeries server to gather a variety of system-related information, which it digests

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• FormSprint Gets a New PDF Archive

  December 7, 2004 Alex Woodie

  Integrated Custom Software will begin shipping a new document archive for its FormSprint suite of OS/400 document management software early next year. As an integrated component of FormSprint, the archive will allow users to search for a document housed in an OS/400 database, and then pull it up on a PC as PDF file. From there, printing, e-mailing, or faxing the document is just a few button clicks away. Archiving is one of the hottest areas in document management these days. Even without new federal regulations dictating how companies should store their documents, electronic document storage needs would be growing

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• Bsafe Gets New OS/400 Security Solution Out the Door

  December 7, 2004 Alex Woodie

  Bsafe Information Systems says it’s now shipping a new release of its OS/400 security software suite that includes features that can help users comply with government mandates calling for tighter security of data. The new changed data tracking feature, which was originally planned for Bsafe/Global Security for iSeries Version 3.3 in January, is now available in Version 3.5, according to the Israeli software company, which also says it’s making strides to break into the American market. Bsafe/Global Security for iSeries performs a number of security-related functions for OS/400 servers, including managing OS/400 security settings and exit points, detecting and preventing

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• LTO 3 Tape Makes Its Way to Market

  December 7, 2004 Alex Woodie

  The third generation of Linear Tape-Open products is finally here, just in time for the IT holiday shopping season. With double the performance of the previous LTO Ultrium 2 spec, tape drives built on LTO Ultrium 3 technology offer 80-MB-per-second native transfer speeds, while LTO 3 cartridges can hold 400 GB native. The three LTO 3 drive manufacturers–Certance (formerly Seagate), Hewlett-Packard, and IBM–are either shipping LTO 3 drives now or will be shortly. The LTO Ultrium 3 spec is one of the so-called “super” half-inch tape drive technologies, and it is in the same general class as

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• Profound Launches RPG-to-Web Conversion Tool for the Masses

  December 7, 2004 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic Software is throwing its hat into the Web refacing ring. The Dayton, Ohio, company, announced a new tool last week that converts RPG-based green screens into completely Web-based GUIs, the kind without WebSphere, green screens, or OLTP fees lurking just beneath the surface. Profound claims that the conversion tool, which is part of its RPG Smart Pages development environment, will convert 90 percent of green screens with no intervention. Profound Logic built its reputation in the AS/400 market of old with RPG-Alive, a collection of handy utilities for boosting the productivity of RPG programmers. In 2002, well into

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• Original Adds Variable Data to Software Testing Suite

  November 30, 2004 Alex Woodie

  During software testing, it can be a daunting task to generate a separate test script for each type of data that needs to be tested against the application. To satisfy the need for more productive and precise testing, Original Software recently introduced a new product called TestSmart that automatically populates a single test script with different real-world data on each test run. The English testing specialist has also added regulatory compliance to the testing fold with a new release of TestPlan. Announced last month at its annual user conference in Chicago, Original’s new TestSmart module is a plug-in for the

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• iSeries: The Low-Cost Choice for Kansas County Government

  November 30, 2004 Alex Woodie

  It seems counterintuitive at first. Given the choice of building a solution on an iSeries server or building one on a less expensive Intel-based server, the iSeries solution costs less in the end. But that is what’s happening across the state of Kansas, where a reseller by the name of InfiniTec is keeping county governments running lean and mean, year after year, with RPG software, technical services, and iSeries hardware. There used to be several software vendors that developed and sold iSeries-based software packages to county governments in Kansas, says Sonny Sagar, director of marketing at InfiniTec, based in

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