• Hand Scanners Send Buddy Punching Packing At Simkins Industries

  March 2, 2004 Alex Woodie

  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

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• MyDoom.F Hits OS/400 Shop Hard, Deletes 25,000 Documents

  March 2, 2004 Alex Woodie

  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

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• Vendors Chase the Single Sign On Prize

  March 2, 2004 Alex Woodie

  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

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• PeopleSoft Announces RFID Software As Target Issues Mandate

  March 2, 2004 Alex Woodie

  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

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• Lakeview Launches MIMIX network1 IP Accelerators

  February 24, 2004 Alex Woodie

  Lakeview Technology scored a major coup today, when it announced the formation of an exclusive OEM agreement to resell Expand Networks‘ line of IP ACCELERATOR appliances in the data replication market. Lakeview has tweaked the devices, which already showed a special affinity for compressing OS/400 data streams, to allow further compression of its own MIMIX data replication software for OS/400, and the company says network1 users can expect to squeeze seven times as much MIMIX data through the same pipes. Expand Networks’ IP ACCELERATOR devices use patented techniques to detect patterns in IP traffic at the byte-level. Instead of

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• LANSA Ramps Up for RFID, Joins EPCglobal

  February 24, 2004 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is taking concrete steps to develop a radio frequency identification (RFID) solution by the end of the year. Last week the software company announced it has joined EPCglobal, the industry organization tasked with creating the open data standards to be used by RFID hardware and software to enable wireless inventory tracking. As a founding member of EPCglobal, LANSA will have a hand in shaping the standards, thereby ensuring compatibility with its future RFID offering. Over the last year, LANSA officials have strongly hinted the company would develop an offering for the rapidly evolving RFID space. Considering the Chicago company’s

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• Sterling Commerce Brings Gentran Integration Suite to OS/400

  February 24, 2004 Alex Woodie

  OS/400 shops searching for enterprise-strength integration software may want to check out the Gentran Integration Suite, which Sterling Commerce recently made available as a native program for the OS/400 and z/OS platforms. A slew of plug-ins gives Java-based GIS Version 3.0 an abundance of capabilities, ranging from business process design and enterprise application integration connectivity to classic electronic data interchange translation and UCCnet compliance. With its older electronic document interchange software in maintenance mode, Sterling is banking on customers upgrading to GIS. Sterling, a subsidiary of SBC Communications, has been in the electronic document interchange (EDI) and enterprise application

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• M-Tech Simplifies Discovery of User IDs Across Disparate Systems

  February 24, 2004 Alex Woodie

  One of the trouble spots when implementing identity management systems is user ID discovery. It takes a lot of work to sort out the different user IDs that people use to access disparate systems. M-Tech Information Technology has a new product that automates much of this user ID discovery process, while providing an upgrade path to its full ID-Synch user provisioning system. M-Tech is also developing new OS/400-specific capabilities in its P-Synch password synchronization software. Identity Management Suite Version 3.0, launched earlier this month, includes two new components, ID-Discover and ID-Access, as well as the two core components, P-Synch and

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• Free Lunches No Easy Task for FSP

  February 17, 2004 Alex Woodie

  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

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• WebSmart 4.0 Is Cornerstone of BCD’s Web Application Stack

  February 17, 2004 Alex Woodie

  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.

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