BCD is pleased to announce the successful launch of the new www.bcdsoftware.com.
Our new site integrates both the previous sales and technical sites, bcdsoftware.com and excelsystems.com, with all-updated content as well as hundreds of new pages with supporting information for all of our software solutions.
The new, integrated site is designed to be more useful to both existing and prospective customers. Below are some of the highlights of the new site.
Integration
The new site integrates content from the earlier release of the BCD sales site with tools and information previously found at www.excelsystems.com. Now, whether you need to download an update for a product you own, or learn about a new product that interests you, www.bcdsoftware.com is the site to visit.
From the new site you can also jump out to myBCDsoftware.com, where existing customers can more easily get the latest product releases, review the status of their open tasks, and confirm their license keys and maintenance dates. If you are currently evaluating BCD products, you can also request a temporary login to the site.
Improved Menus for Easier Navigation
In support of the wide range of new content at the site, we have also improved the site's navigation. www.bcdsoftware.com has two principal menu systems: along the top of the page and down the left side of the site's internal pages.
Along the top you'll find high-level links to products, services, support and downloads (among others). Within the different areas of the site the left-column menu includes more helpful links specifically relating to the page topic. For example, at the main WebSmart page, you'll find links to detailed product information (ranging from feature lists to customer stories); learning tools (demos, videos, Webcasts); downloads (updates and current releases) and support (the KB, documentation, training information, etc.).
In addition, some pages have an additional menu on the right, providing lists of additional topics related to the page's theme.
And finally, we have also added breadcrumbs along the top of all the pages, which will easily help you keep track of where you are within the site.
Lots of New Content!
The new site wouldn't really be that much to crow about if all we'd done is put a pretty face on old information. But that's far from the case: the new www.bcdsoftware.com includes literally hundreds of new pages with in-depth information about all our products. An extensive array of documented screen shots, feature lists and background documents provide a wealth of information about each of our applications.
At BCD we have always had the philosophy that if we put all the information in your hands, you'll make the best software choice for your organization. With this in mind, we are striving to make available as much detail as possible about each of our products, and we're confident that we can persuade you that BCD has the highest-quality solutions in our marketplace. And remember that if after reviewing all the information online, you still have questions, a full function product demo is only a quick download away.
Feedback
As always, we would welcome any observations you have on any aspect of the new site; just drop us a note any time, of give us a call at (250) 655-1766.
Catapult 6 and ProGen Plus 9 in General Availability
If you already own these products, you can log in to myBCDsoftware.com to download the latest releases, as well as confirm your license keys and maintenance status. By downloading from myBCDsoftware.com you can avoid having to fill out the download form each time. If you haven't yet received your myBCDsoftware.com login, please contact Technical Support to request it.
With this announcement, Catapult and ProGen Plus join the recently released WebSmart 6, Clover 1.5 and Nexus 3, also in GA as of October of this year. With major releases of so many products over the last couple of months, this has been a busy summer and fall for BCD–but watch this space for more announcements! All of these products have already entered new development phases, and the next versions are in the works.
Catapult 6
Catapult 6 has had an extended beta period, due to no fault of its own, but rather because it 'took one for the team' in the documentation bottleneck we ran into while producing new user guides for all the products released this fall. Catapult 6 has been running happily here at ESDI for many months, as well as on the systems of our beta participants, which included some of our most demanding clients. Now that the User Guide has been completed and software made available, you can enjoy the benefits of an extra-robust beta test period.
Catapult 6 is a major new release with a number of significant new features, including the following:
Support for polling PC directories and distributing PC files using the same grab rules features that you apply to iSeries files.
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 (illustrated at right).
Support for retrieving distribution/mailing list values from outside files.
Support for mail group entry replacement values.
The "Poll-a-Dir" feature (ability to poll PC directories for files to distribute) has been in particularly high demand, and we're very pleased with the features we've been able to support in its initial release. 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.
For additional information, please visit the Catapult Home Page at www.bcdsoftware.com. From there you can review an online listing of new features and download the Catapult 6 Upgrader's Guide.
ProGen Plus 9
In years past we have been less ambitious in naming ProGen Plus releases, with 4.0, 4.5 and 4.7 all being major releases of the software. What this means is that ProGen Plus version 9 is actually more like the 15th major release of the software since it's inception nearly 20 years ago. As you no doubt realize, this is a powerful testimony to ProGen's usefulness to generations of programmers, and its ability to continue to provide feature-rich functionality that is relevant to current development needs and a constantly changing business environment.
For this release of ProGen Plus we devoted our development time primarily to addressing specific requests from our lengthy list of long-time customers, as well as many reported issues. As a result, ProGen Plus version 9 is our most robust, stable version ever.
For additional information on ProGen Plus 9, please visit the product home page on our new website, where you can download the Upgrader's Guide with a complete list of features.
Upgrading to Catapult 6 and ProGen Plus 9
To download Catapult 6 and ProGen Plus 9 please visit the Free Software Downloads page at the BCD web site, or log in to myBCDsoftware.com, where you can also verify your license keys and maintenance status.
Catapult/Nexus Feature Profile: Publishing iSeries Reports to the Nexus ECM
Catapult has been able to publish documents to the Nexus ECM for some time now, but with the radical overhaul of the Nexus ECM in version 3, the relationship between the products has become all the more useful. Below is a quick overview of how to set up the links between Catapult and Nexus, and an explanation of how this can be useful to you.
Why do I need Catapult and Nexus to Work Together?
The need to establish links between Catapult and Nexus can be driven from a starting point in either of the two applications:
Starting with Catapult. Many of our Catapult customers initially purchased the software to address a particular business need, such as automatically distributing invoices or sales reports in a timely manner. However, Catapult has a tendency to 'grow' on you. Over time, most of our customers find more and more uses for the software, resulting in the creation of a burgeoning body of documents that, in time, can start to be a management challenge. The Nexus ECM can address this problem, creating a secure, structured, indexed Web interface to the documents created with Catapult. So rather than depending on your recipient's sometimes volatile email inboxes as the sole means of keeping documents available, you can provide them with a login to their personalized Nexus site, and use the ECM to automatically manage the content they have access to at any given time.
Starting with Nexus. If you started by looking at Nexus as a way to organize and provide secure access to your online content (Internet or intranet), then one of your objectives may be to also pull in content generated on the iSeries as spool files. Using Catapult you can automatically select specific documents, reformat them to be viewed online (usually as PDFs, HTML pages or RTF docs), and publish them to specific locations in the Nexus ECM. You can also associate search keywords with the documents, to populate the Nexus ECM index, and create subsetted lists of documents to different user groups.
The Catapult 6 guide includes a tutorial section that describes how to set up the Nexus ECM to handle the documents generated by Catapult, and the options to use in your Catapult grab rules. You can view the tutorial here, or download the Catapult 6 guide from our website. Space doesn't allow us to reproduce that in this newsletter, but here is an overview of how you would do it:
In Nexus, start by creating your groups and users, with appropriate authorities. The easiest way to do this is to create the groups in Nexus, and then import iSeries user profiles into those groups. This makes it easy to maintain authorities consistent with your iSeries setup.
Then create folders in the Nexus ECM to correspond to the content you will be generating from Catapult.
Lastly, in Nexus you need to create distribution rules to handle how the Catapult files will be handled. In your distribution rules you can specify the location where the documents will be stored and the authorities assigned to them. Here is an illustration of this step, where we are in the process of creating a rule identifying which spool files will be handled by this rule:
You can define the distribution rule selection criteria using either standard spool file attributes or your own custom keywords. You can then specify the authorities to be assigned to the file, as well as a custom template (CSS) to be used by the ECM when displaying this document.
The next step is to create a Catapult grab rule that ties into the Nexus folder(s) and distribution rule(s) you have created. This process is very simple, requiring just a few additions to your Catapult grab rule:
When you set this up you can simply send the documents over and use Nexus as a rudimentary archiving facility. Or, you can click the Search tab (from the window above) to create custom search index entries populated with values extracted from your report body. Using these tools, in conjunction with the ECM's distribution rules, you can create structured views and searches over Nexus ECM documents and folders.
If you weren't able to participate in these when they were first broadcast, you can now visit BCD's Webcast archive and run them from there.
On the archive page you'll also find half a dozen other recent webcasts, primarily addressing topics related to challenges you face when making the transition from a green-screen to a Web environment in your development projects.
www.bcdsoftware.com Feature Profile: At a Glance Product Overviews
Among the additions to the new www.bcdsoftware.com site is a set of At a Glance pages for each of our products. The new informational sections provide a useful snapshot of each BCD product, in a format that allows you to cut through the fluff and see a summary list of the most relevant and important features of the product.
These pages of the site were written by one of our ex-Technical Support managers, so the focus is very practical, directed towards using the software in a real-world environment. So whether you are looking for a software solution for your organization, or comparing a BCD product with an offering from another company, the At a Glance pages will give you a useful and concise introductory overview of the tool.
If you do want more detailed information on the features in a product, you can click on the Features link in the left menu and work with a more extensive, illustrated software profile.
New WebSmart Example Programs: Last Error Program Field, Notes Maintenance Pgm, Etc.
We have published a few new WebSmart example programs this month, adding to the more than 120 examples currently available:
Example 125 - Using the Last Error Program Field. This program uses the opnstrmf function to illustrate how to employ WebSmart's last error program field to return meaningful error messages in your applications.
Example 124 - Displaying URL Variables in a Popup Box. This example uses JavaScript to read the parameters passed in the URL query string and display a popup box. If you attempted to visit www.excelsystems.com in the last couple of weeks, this is the technique we employed to pop up the box welcoming you to the new integrated sales and support site at www.bcdsoftware.com.
Example 123 - Notes Maintenance Program. This example is a bit more advanced than some, and illustrates a technique for editing a Notes file (with old-style 80A text fields) in a Web interface.
If you have any questions about any of the examples posted, please drop a note to Technical Support.
Summary List of Recent Updates
WebSmart 6.04
There is a new update for the iSeries side of WebSmart 6, update W604001P. This update addresses two reported problems with the sendmailex function.
For additional information on this and other updates, please visit the WebSmart Updates page.
New www.bcdsoftware.com Goes Live! 
you can avoid having to fill out the download form each time. If you haven't yet received your myBCDsoftware.com login, please 
