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 BCD Wins Two Search400.com Product of the Year Awards!
BCD is excited to announce that Catapult and WebSmart have won Gold and Silver awards at the Search400.com Product of the Year awards presentation.
The Search400.com editorial staff, along with users, industry experts, analysts, and consultants judged the awards.
Catapult won the Gold Award in the Document/Image Management Software category. WebSmart won the Silver award in the Application Development Tools category.
In their results, Search400.com published the following Catapult summary: "The judges also raved about Catapult's ease of integration into established environments. Catapult does not require numerous modules to add on; all the functionality you need is in the one product. On top of that, it's easy to use. Authorized users or administrators define the rules they want for a report, and the product runs. The rules need to be established only once for a report.
"It's a complete all-in-one product," one judge said. "It is packed with features that allows for a wide range of document management tasks."
About WebSmart, the editors added that "BCD's WebSmart follows through on its promise to quickly generate Web applications... create iSeries Web Applications in less than 30 minutes."
BCD and our development team are very excited to receive these awards. Thank you to all who voted for us.
For further details on these awards, please visit the BCD Software web site.
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Support Office Closure - Thursday, February 9
The BCD Tech Support (and Development) offices will be closed
Thursday, February 9 for our annual staff meeting.
If you need assistance, you can leave messages and call back information with our sales office at 630-986-0800. For non-urgent matters, you can leave a voice mail message at our regular support number (250-655-1766), or send us an email. We will respond to voice and email messages promptly on Friday morning. For issues requiring immediate attention the voice mail message will provide cell phone numbers so that you can contact a support representative during the day.
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Upcoming WebSmart Training Class
There is one Fundamentals of Web Development with WebSmart training class scheduled for February. If you are interested in attending either this class or another one coming up in the spring please fill out the Training Request form at our web site.
The class this month will be held in
Frostburg, MD February 13 to 16. Frostburg, MD is approximately equidistant from Pittsburgh and Washington/Baltimore, so you can fly to either city and drive from there. The nearest town for lodging and dining is Cumberland. There are several hotels available in Cumberland and the Frostburg area; the Rocky Gap Lodge has been particularly recommended. There are also several ski areas within an hour of Frostburg.
This class is being hosted by a client who has offered to make a few seats available for guests. The class is targeted primarily at beginners, and will be using new training material developed for WebSmart 5, incorporating many new features in the software. For further details please contact Tech Support.
Catapult 6 Beta Available Soon
We know that you've been eagerly anticipating the next release of Catapult, and the development team is preparing the software for its initial beta release. If you are interested in participating in the Catapult 6 Beta, please fill out the form at our web site.
Catapult 6 is a major new release which includes many new features, including the following:
- Support for polling PC directories.
- Grab-rule security, to specify who is authorized to view and edit specific grab rules.
- CC and BCC emailing support.
- Updated Console and Poller Configuration UI.
The Poll-a-Dir feature (ability to poll PC directories) has been in particularly high demand, and we're very pleased with its initial features. Depending on the formats of the files you select, not only will you be able to distribute them with Catapult, but also split and extract other data from them, just as you do with your iSeries reports.
We plan to make the Catapult 6 beta available soon, and are now accepting applications to participate in the beta program. If you have any questions about the upcoming release, or any of the features it includes, please contact Technical Support.
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Rate This Newsletter!
As we begin the new year we are taking stock of the services we offer you, and among the areas we're working on improving is this newsletter and its content. Please take a minute or two to answer a few quick questions in our Tech Update Survey, and give us some feedback. You can use this survey to let us know what types of content you'd like to see more of, and what areas you don't find useful.
We do appreciate your feedback. This newsletter is now distributed monthly to several thousand recipients, so we do want to ensure that its content is useful and relevant to you. If you have any particular questions or comments about Technical Support, please give Kris Waugh a call at (250) 655-1766, or drop him a note.
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BCD @ Spring COMMON Conference and Expo
As always, BCD will be present at the spring COMMON to be held this year in Minneapolis, MN at the end of March. If you are coming for the Expo (March 26-28) please drop by our booth for a chat. And don't forget to request a demo of the new versions of Nexus, Catapult, Clover and WebSmart!
At the conference, Kevin Cronin will also be conducting a WebSmart lab on Monday, March 27 at, 2:00 pm. This lab has been well-attended (and highly rated) the last few times we've held it, so if you're going to be in Minneapolis take a second now to visit the COMMON web site to sign up and ensure you get a seat.
ProGen Plus 8.2 Now IBM Server-Proven
We are pleased to announce that IBM has certified ProGen Plus, the multi-Award winning RPG/400 and ILE/RPG Program Generator and Report Writer that so many of you have come to rely on, as an IBM ServerProven® solution. This is the fourth BCD product to receive this designation.
The ServerProven program assures new IBM customers that complete business solutions including third party hardware, middleware and software products, have been validated, optimized and documented to run reliably on IBM servers. IBM further certifies that ServerProven solutions have been successfully implemented and used by at least one customer.
In addition to certifying the viability of these solutions, IBM's ServerProven program provides a financial incentive to customers who choose these products. Customers who qualify may save up to $5,000 when ProGen Plus is purchased in conjunction with an IBM eServer computer. The details of this rebate are available at www.ibm.com/servers/solutions/finder.
DbGen Tip: Organizing your Files
While many of you reading this Tech Update may have barely heard of DbGen, you might in fact already own it! DbGen is often sold as a companion product to ProGen Plus because of their shared components and functionality.
To check whether you have DbGen, just execute a WRKLIB DB#LIB on your iSeries. And if you don't have it, don't despair, you can easily download a fully-functioning trial version from www.bcdsoftware.com.
Though these days everyone seems hypnotized by the glamour of creating flashy web applications, the fact remains that without a solid, well-designed database, you're not going to get too far online.
And this is where DbGen shines: in helping you clean up and organize your files, and impose some standards on how your database is built. DbGen is a database management tool which provides the capability to organize and maintain a database on the iSeries. DbGen organizes your database files by application, and utilizes a data dictionary which provides a central definition of field attributes. DbGen provides all the functions necessary to define, generate and create physical and logical files. It also allows you to import your existing application files, enabling the product to be used for both new and existing application development.
DbGen stores your file definitions and provides an interface which makes it much easier and faster to work with existing files, and to create new files and logical views. When file or dictionary definitions are changed, the changes ripple through all referencing files and dependent views. The affected files can then be recreated through a batch process.
Let's look at just a couple of DbGen's many functions, to illustrate how you can use it. Let's begin by looking at the
DBIMPPF (Import Physical File) command, illustrated at right:
Some of the key values on this screen are:
Physical File to Import
Type the name of the file to import to DbGen.
Number of Records to Duplicate
If you're importing an application to DbGen, you can pull in all the records. Alternately, if you just need a sampling of records for QA or a test library, you can specify a number of records to import.
DbGen Application and Dictionary Names
DbGen organizes your files into applications and dictionaries, to help you enforce standardized file names and consistent locations. The Field Group and remaining field name options are related to this same objective.
Import Dependant Logicals
And finally, you can choose to import all the logicals for your physical files in the same step.
After pressing Enter on this screen, the tool would import your file, and you would then have access to working with your file within DbGen. You can repeat this step for as many files as you need to import.
Creating Logicals
Despite all the important and sophisticated features available in DbGen for organizing your database, one of its best-loved features is actually one of the simplest: the ease with which you can create logical views.
After creating or importing a file to DbGen, you just select a menu option to work with your logicals, and from there you can press F6 to create a new logical.
First you specify your file name and a couple of other attributes, and when you press Enter DbGen presents the panel at right from which you specify the keys to your new logical. All you have to do is put the numbers next to the keys by which you want to sort your file, press Enter, and then create the logical view. You can easily create several logical views in just a couple of minutes.
DbGen is a mature tool that has been used for many years by hundreds of customers. DbGen has many other popular features, including the ability to associate validations, editing, help text and window lookups with your files at the database level, and have them automatically included in your new ProGen Plus definitions.
If you have enjoyed working with ProGen Plus as an application generator, you'll be sure to appreciate DbGen as you work through the more onerous tasks involved in creating and working with your database.
If you have any questions about DbGen, or would like to try it out, please contact Technical Support.
New WebSmart Example Program: Tabbed Forms
Our support team has added another WebSmart example program this month. The latest program is Example 108:
- Example 108 - An example of how you can use JavaScript and CSS techniques to make your forms more manageable and look better.
For further details on any of the WebSmart examples, or if you have any questions on how to implement the techniques they demonstrate, please contact Technical Support.
Summary List of Recent Updates
WebSmart 5.26
WebSmart Build 8634 (2006/01/30). Includes the following features and changes:
- Support for inline PML tags which provide improved interoperability with external HTML editors.
- Smarter field drop into the HTML (detects inline PML).
- Improved F9 auto-format which handles omitted curly brackets and preserves bookmarks.
- Eliminate segment maximum.
- Improved object name validation.
- Additional template substitution variables for user, date and time.
- No longer require file name on HTML field tags.
Please visit the WebSmart updates page for further information.
Catapult 5.66
Catapult 5.66 is now available for download from our web site. Version 5.66 (Poller: 5.66 build 17, posted January 17, 2006) includes the following features and fixes:
- A new option to enable a socket Keep alive message in the Poller configuration. This can be enabled if you find the Poller and iSeries stop communicating during long idle periods.
- Added support for Nexus 3 ECM document additions. You can now distribute documents to multiple ECM folders based on your distribution rule.
- Placing a comma in the fax number for a group will work correctly in rules that use split sections.
- When emailing a spoolfile to support, the attachments are no longer showing up in the body of the email.
- A new control character added to *SCS spoolfiles (only useable by certain printers) is now being trapped and removed. This was causing accented 'u' characters to show up in reports.
- You can no longer place a non integer value in the Font Size Select box when overriding the default spoolfile formatting attributes.
- The incremental split section replacement character &i is now using the correct split number.
- The Report subject replacement character &s will no longer create a loop when an &s is part of the replaced value.
- Users that had previously set up an anonymous user login will no longer be prevented from signing onto the Poller configuration.
- The filtering options for 'Pending only' and 'Errors only' in the Requests and errors list is now displaying the correct request.
Please visit the Catapult updates page for further information.
Docu-Mint 6.1
The following Docu-Mint update was recently prepared:
- DN60R016 - Resolves an issue where renaming record formats generated a *ERROR for the usage.
Please visit the Docu-Mint updates page for further information.
File-Flash Plus 4.20
This FFPlus update was also made available in January:
- FFP40009 - 2006/01/19 - Allows you to properly export negative values to a CSV file. Please note that for this to work the "Choice for editing numeric fields" must be set for "File Flash Editing".
Please visit the File-Flash Plus updates page for further information.
© 2006 ExcelSystems Software Development, Inc.
ProGen WebSmart and ProGen Plus are Registered Trademarks in the US and Canada, and Trademarks in all other countries.
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