Vacuum maker Rexair faced some difficult choices when it came to upgrading their business processes. The 71-year-old Michigan company relied heavily on people and paper to keep orders and payments humming along. But the manual processes, and lack of agility proved too costly, which is why Rexair called in Quadrant Software to help automate many of its processes.

According to Quadrant, Rexair’s business processes were archaic. For starters, the company relied on expensive pre-printed forms generated from its Infor System21 ERP system. On top of that, Rexair implemented a forms overlay solution; however, it required costly and time consuming programming

When it comes to ensuring that certain regulatory controls have been implemented in your ERP system, it’s one thing if Joe from accounting gives the “thumbs up” sign while grabbing a cup of coffee, and quite another when the approval stems from a regimented process originating from outside the company. Auditors, in particular, would really rather have an external process, such as the one implemented by Approva‘s BizRights program, which actually is the remediation system used by two of the Big 4 accounting firms.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been a tremendously disrupting influence on IT shops over the last

You’re only as strong as your weakest link. For many iSeries shops, the weakest link is an easy-to-guess password that could give attackers access to critical systems. To help iSeries shops clamp down on weak passwords, PowerTech Group last week unveiled a new utility called Password Control that identifies weak passwords and forces i5/OS users to pick passwords that are hard to guess.

OS/400 contains basic password functionality. As an OS/400 system administrator, you can require that users pick passwords with a certain number of digits, force them to pick a new password after a certain period of time has

BOSaNOVA this week announced a new appliance that encrypts tapes and other portable media as backups are being performed. Called the Q3 Storage Security Encryption, the new device is intended to prevent sensitive data from being compromised should a tape get lost or otherwise fall into the wrong hands, which has been occurring with surprising regularity.

You’ve probably heard the story before: Organization A (Bank of America, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Johns Hopkins University, the IRS) reports that it has lost a backup tape (laptop, hard drive, network security), compromising the integrity of 50,000 (100,000, 1.2 million) customers, costing the

Keeping your iSeries server’s direct access storage device (DASD) in peak working condition can be a tedious task, one that sometimes is best left to dedicated utilities that can track disk usage, reclaim lost disk space, and forecast expected disk needs. One such tool, the DASD-Plus utility from S4i Systems, was augmented this week with the delivery of a new graphical interface, called DASD-Plus Chart, that should make disk-related management tasks even easier.

DASD-Plus is a mature product that includes 25 routines that automate standard iSeries housekeeping tasks, such as clearing history logs; compressing data; resizing libraries, job queues,

DataMirror last week unveiled a new release of Transformation Server, its data integration software for sharing massive amounts of data among disparate systems, including DB2/400 and nearly every other major databases management system. With version 6.0, the company has improved the product’s GUI interface, augmented its support for multi-byte character sets, and enhanced its support for replicating SQL Server databases.

DataMirror bills Transformation Server as a high-performance, bi-directional replication solution that keeps an array of target database systems and assorted middleware components–including DB2/400, DB2 UDB, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Teradata, and its own PointBase database management systems–continuously

Antares Management Solutions, an IT outsourcing company specializing in serving insurance companies, has picked CCSS‘ QSystem Monitor systems management software to oversee its bank of IBM iSeries servers, the English iSeries specialist announced last week.

“The nature of our business dictates a critical dependence on effective systems management,” says Doug Powell, an i5 systems engineer for Antares, an ISO-9001 certified company based in Westlake, Ohio. “Our choice of System i had to be complemented by an equally reliable solution provider. CCSS understood our business needs very well.”

While Antares offers a range of service level agreements to meet

iSeries distributor Agilysys last week unveiled a new release of DataMagine, its Windows-based electronic content management offering for eliminating paper output from servers. With version 6.2, the product gains iSeries spool file support, as well as support for double byte character sets (DBCS), which enables it to work with Chinese and Japanese languages.

Agilysys bills DataMagine as an industrial document management system, or DMS, that works with all types of computer systems. The software includes elements normally associated with content management–such as document scanning, indexing, and archiving capabilities–along with the capability to distribute electronic documents via e-mail, fax, the Web,

New Generation Software (NGS) last week unveiled a new collection of business intelligence software designed to work with S2K, an i5/OS-based suite of ERP software from Vormittag Associates (VAI).

NGS says it has developed a new module of its NGS-IQ suite that provides functionality specific to the latest release of VAI’s software, S2K version 3.7.5. The new functionality, which is included in the Real Time Reporting and Analysis module, is a new Web portal that provides VAI users with links to business trend and performance dashboards, reports, and multi-dimensional presentations built directly over the S2K database. The new module provides

Business was painfully slow at the Norfolk County (Massachusetts) Registry of Deeds. Until it implemented an i5/OS-based document management system from BROWNtech, that is.

The Norfolk County Registry of Deeds is the principal office for real estate and property records in the county’s 28 towns. The office provides a range of services, including determining property ownership, researching land titles, and acquiring copies of recorded documents and plans–your standard county fare.

The county used to track properties entirely by paper, which allowed it to process about 160,000 documents per year. This throughput didn’t cut it, however, as it would take