After being announced nearly a year ago and undergoing extended development and beta test periods, SecureZIP for iSeries and zSeries are now available, the product’s developer, PKWARE, announced last week. SecureZIP for iSeries and zSeries combine PKWARE’s traditional PKZIP file compression with PKI certificate or password-protected file encryption capabilities, which the company expects to be warmly accepted by large enterprises looking to comply with new regulations mandating the safe handling of data.

PKWARE has been in the file compression business since the company’s founder, Phil Katz, released the first open source PKZIP product in 1986. Since 2003, the Milwaukee

Mid-Comp International is now shipping a new version of its popular performance monitoring tool for OS/400 servers, called Snapshot/400. The Australian software developer says it completely re-wrote the product for version 10, which is now called Snapshot/TSC (for Total System Control), to reduce the impact of real-time monitoring, make it easier to add new reporting modules, and to include the new generation of i5 servers for capacity planning purposes.

Snapshot is a client-server application, with agents that deploy on the OS/400 server to continuously collect performance data and monitor queues, and a Windows-based component where administrators can “see,” via colorful

iSeries shops generating high volumes of PDF output may be interested in hearing about Adobe PDF Library version 7.0, an updated software developer kit from Datalogics that’s used for integrating high-speed PDF generation directly into applications running on various operating systems, including OS/400. Datalogics boosted the product’s performance, security, and programmability with version 7.0, which Datalogics recently made available.

The Adobe PDF Library is a collection of C, C++, and Java components that allow programmers to embed high-speed creation and manipulation of “true Adobe PDF” documents (so-called because they strictly adhere to the PDF standard and maintain cross-platform compatibility) from

Califon Systems recently introduced a new database analysis tool that’s designed to help programmers and administrators discover how their applications are using data and business processes in preparation for regulatory compliance initiatives or new development projects. The new product, called Countermind, was written in Java, which the company says enables it to run against all the major database systems running on any Java-supported operating system, including DB2/400 on iSeries.

Although Countermind doesn’t fall into any neatly defined product category, the capabilities of the new product are a blend of an application discovery tool (such as the one developed by mainframe