The Lawson Software nation descended upon The Venetian resort in Las Vegas last week for the CUE 2008 annual user conference, where they were presented with hundreds of sessions to attend, and more than a few announcements. Among the notable products introduced at the show is a new Talent Management system that Lawson will deliver to S3 and M3 customers using the software as a service (SaaS) model, as well as the new Smart Office offering. Lawson also acquired a product lifecycle management (PLM) vendor.

Like other ERP software vendors, Lawson recently has been improving the user interface, which is

System i shops looking for an open source alternative to the Big Four systems management software providers–BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM–may want to check out GroundWork Open Source, an upstart developer of open source software that already has several System i customers. Today, the company launched a new release of its eponymous GroundWork line, which adds more scalability, capacity, and an easier installation than previous releases.

San Francisco-based GroundWork was founded four years ago to serve the growing market for commercial open source software. Like other commercial open source software developers, GroundWork relies on

Using a flurry of announcements last week, IBM kept the spotlight on collaborative software, mobile computing, unified communications, and its Lotus software division. Mixed in with product achievements such as bringing desktop-style applications to mobile phones and adding on-demand video and IP telephony features to Lotus Sametime were predictions of how unified communications (UC) would reshape the business world and details of additional investments Big Blue is making in UC technology.

To emphasize what he sees as product differentiation between unified communications coming from IBM compared to UC products on the Microsoft runway, Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM Lotus

ProData Computer Services recently launched version 8 of Database Utility (DBU), its flagship DB2/400 database utility for programmers and power users. With DBU 8.0, System i programmers will enjoy using the tool in the latest Eclipse-based development environment, and will also benefit from several new search functions, commands, and output options. The capability to migrate DDS source to SQL will also be particularly useful for some DBU users.

DBU is a popular and handy utility that makes it easy for programmers, administrators, and users to view and access any file in DB2/400 (sometimes actually referred to by its IBM-given

Patrick Townsend & Associates launched a new program last week aimed at selling its log management and encryption software to managed service providers (MSPs), who in turn will help manage organizations’ System i, Unix, Linux, and Windows servers.

Regulations like PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA are leading organizations to collect and analyze logs from their servers and network devices more than ever, says Pat Townsend, president of the Olympia, Washington, company.

“If they have the right tools, MSPs can perform this service more economically and more securely than most companies can do internally. That’s where we come in,” he says. “MSPs

i5/OS V6R1 shipped last week, and ACOM Solutions is one of the software vendors supporting the new operating system. ACOM last week said its EZPayManager/400 and EZeDOCS/400 product suites have been tested, and no problems were encountered.

Not all vendors have had an easy time supporting i5/OS V6R1, which officially became available on Friday. An informal survey of i5/OS software vendors last month revealed that some software vendors had not completed the program conversion process required to run under the new operating system, while others expected to complete the process later this year.

Apparently, ACOM was not one of the

IBM server reseller Mainline Information Systems has hooked up with business process outsourcer BPO Management Services to provide full-service outsourcing of System i, System z, and Intel servers, the companies announced last week.

With Mainline supplying the IBM hardware connection and technical services, and BPOMS’ IT Infrastructure and Outsourcing (ITO) Services division supplying more technical services as well as data center facilities, the two vendors aim to attract mid market companies that want to completely outsource their servers or just co-locate them in a larger facility.

“By partnering with Mainline, BPOMS can now offer its services to a broad new

Accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) data stored in New Generation Software‘s Concert Series financial software can now be accessed via Excel using its ConcertPro data access utility, the software company announced last week. Previously, only general ledger (GL) data was accessible with ConcertPro.

While NGS is best known for its line of i5/OS-based business intelligence software, the Sacramento, California, company also develops and sells an integrated financial package that runs on the IBM System i. Called the Concert Series Financial Management System, the suite includes applications for managing AP, AR, GL, payroll, and human resources activities at

Software and services provider Binary Tree is partnering with The Asentus Group and GrokWorx Software to deliver virtual training in IBM Lotus Notes 8 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 migrations and deployments, the company announced last week.

Organizations that participate in Binary Tree’s new training regimen will get hands-on work with the vendor’s Common Migration Tool (CMT) product line, which provides analysis and assistance for migrations to Microsoft Exchange, migrations to Lotus Notes, and will soon offer migrations to Google.

The first two CMT products that will be covered in the training classes include CMT Universal, a Notes-to-Exchange migration solution that’s

For over a year, Portuguese ERP software developer Unitek searched for a way to create a Web-based front-end to go along with its RPG-based ERP system, called e-XXX. The software company had been burned when it went down the .NET road, and it wasn’t looking to relive that experience. Caution turned to cheers, however, following the success Unitek had with Profound Logic‘s Web development tool, called RPG Smart Pages (RPGsp).

After running into stability and performance limitations with the .NET experience, Unitek decided to take a native System i approach to Web development. “We wanted a solution that would