References and User Quotes

References | User Quotes

User Quotes

Hewitt Coleman & Associates, Inc.

"WebSmart is marvelous! We use it to replace older System i green screens and found that the modernized screens we created with it are quite popular with our customers. WebSmart is very easy to use and it helps us do our job quickly. We love it!."

-- Tom Windham, IT Manager

ESP Business Solutions

"As a veteran RPG programmer, the thought of learning HTML, JavaScript and Java was very overwhelming so I never thought I would ever get into web programming. But WebSmart has given me hope and I am getting exposure to HTML and JavaScript. GREAT product for RPG programmers to get exposure to web programming!"

-- Shashi Jalota

RVOS Farm Mutual Insurance Company

"In a short period of time I found that Web services are a very simple thing to implement when you use WebSmart."

-- Weems Hutto, IT Consultant to RVOS

Mitsubishi Fuso Truck of America

"I researched thoroughly for the best iSeries web development solution for Mitsubishi Fuso (MFTA) and narrowed it to three. We have 3 full-time 20+ year RPG programmers and wanted to retain them but not expand. I attended training for the first two products. In short the first product was too complicated, the second was too top-heavy... the third was WebSmart. BCD said they could show it to me, however, I could also download it along with the tutorial and understand it. Yeah, Right !!! I thought. I was amazed! I did understand it. I finished a small project in two days.

I also evaluated BCD's Tech Support. Their knowledge, pride in product and customer attitude, proved this was a "fit". I made the right Choice with BCD and WebSmart. We're on track with our new FUSO.NET site and having lots of fun getting there."

-- Susan DeFrance, Sr. Pgmr / Lead Analyst
Read the Snapshot in Productivity »

Academic Book Services

"I reviewed in detail several leading iSeries web application development tools, and query tools to modernize our iSeries applications. I'm very conservative and detest risks and surprises... I like software that works. I selected WebSmart, Nexus Portal, & Clover from BCD. These integrated products set the standard from which all others should be judged.

The software works well and the support is tremendous. The decision to use BCD products is one of the biggest no-brainers a CIO can make."

-- Gary Stewart, Director IT
Read the Snapshot in Productivity »

Cereal Foods Processor, Inc

"Cereal Food's development platform has been based upon BCD products for over 10 years. Our interactions with BCD as an organization have always been outstanding. If fact, BCD has become the ruler we use to measure new vendors against."

-- Bill Meyer, Director Computer Services

Cereal Food Processors, Inc. licensed BCD's System i integrated modernization suite: WebSmart, Nexus Portal, Clover Query, SmartCharts and Catapult.

MetaTech

"I would first like to compliment BCD on what a fine product WebSmart has become. MetaTech AS is a small software consultancy specializing in banking software for banks and credit unions in Norway. In order to offer a complete banking application to new and existing customers, we developed an Internet banking application that our clients customers use to check their accounts, pay bills and transfer funds. We chose WebSmart as our tool for developing our Internet banking application for many reasons, the most important being:

• WebSmart is a complete development environment. We need no other tools to develop our application. That saves us a lot of time and money.
• WebSmart needs almost no prior knowledge of RPG. Even though almost all of our development is in RPG and our banking application is written in RPG, the person who is developing our WebSmart application is not an RPG programmer.
• Our platform is iSeries and we want our Internet application to run on an iSeries too. No PC-servers are needed (or wanted!) .
• We are calling RPG programs in our banking application from WebSmart thereby reusing existing code, again time and money saved.
• We need the best security for our application. WebSmart has the technology we need for an advanced Internet banking application. We are using serverside cookies (or SMURFs), SSL and validation lists to make our site secure.
• In the future we may have to develop a WAP version of our application. WebSmart has support for WAP applications too.
• We have yet to reach any limitations in WebSmart. We haven’t had a problem that WebSmart couldn’t solve."

-- Greg Stahl - MetaTech

Lamps Plus

"I had a need to present AS/400 data in a browser. I looked at IBM's WebSphere but it's costly and cumbersome to maintain. I looked at CGIDEV and actually created some pages using it. But it's still very labor intensive from a programmer's standpoint.

"Then I looked at WebSmart. I actually loaded the product, ran through the tutorial AND, get this, had my availability web page (for our multi-store kiosks) up and running in a single morning! This product is nothing short of amazing. I'm hooked and don't want to look back. By the end of the second day I had created a P.O. for BCD's WebSmart.

"I'd recommend this product to any AS/400 programmer. It's fast to learn, the response time in screens is sub-second and the results look polished right out of the box. Give it a try."

— Chuck Ackerman, MIS Director

I've used many methods for development and deployment on the iSeries, and WebSmart is by far the easiest, fastest, and most user friendly. It provides a complete environment for development and control of applications, cuts development time and cost, allows use and seamless integration of many different technologies and protocols, and is easier for the users to learn and use. Everybody likes it. WebSmart eliminates these traditional limitations by streamlining and accelerating the development process, and by providing virtually unlimited graphical web based presentation of applications and data. I think every iSeries shop should be using WebSmart.

— Bill Hicks

Formica Corporation (after having WebSmart for two months)

"This was a no-brainer. Using WebSmart on the AS/400 seemed like the appropriate alternative. As our requirements change, we can easily make changes to the application. It's very supportable. The templates were very helpful for the base code, once you have the basic display logic, then we could go in and tweak it to get the things that we needed for our situation. Everything that customer service came up with, we were able to make work using WebSmart. This project has visibility from the CEO and Director of Marketing. Both have been active in rounding out the functional specifications."

— Phil Catlin, Application Development Manager

Formica Corporation (after having WebSmart for six months)

"In any one day we have 550 to 600 users running between 1,000 to 1,200 sessions of WebSmart developed applications on our iSeries and we have not needed to upgrade our hardware. Our system response time has actually improved since implementing WebSmart. One of the reasons is we replaced many interactive query jobs with WebSmart jobs that run in the batch subsystem. We have fewer jobs servicing the same number of users. I can safely say this project was a success. Now that the application is Web-based, it is getting 10,000 hits per Week. We're serving about 16,000 unique page hits and 18 MB of data everyday. We've decided to develop 5 or 6 more applications."

Stanley Furniture

"WebSmart is by far the Best AS/400 to Web product I have ever used. I only wish we had employed this product sooner."

— Tammy Joice

Kwik Trip

"WebSmart was definitely a good choice -- It cuts down on our development time and lets us get new applications rolled out more quickly. It's good to see the technology we chose has made such a positive impact."

-- Ed Strahs, Kwik Trip, Inc
Read the Kwik Trip Case Study »

Baker Petrolite

"With the mandated Sarbanes Oxley laws, we needed to streamline a security approval "work-flow process" that would keep records on all requests for security clearance. WebSmart helped us establish a Web based application with in a very short period of time and with a minimal learning curve... and just in time for our audit!"

-- Greg Barch, Baker Petrolite

DCS, Inc.

"Our goal at DCS Software is to develop and deploy the very best software solutions for Police, Fire and EMS agencies available on the market. For the past 23 years, DCS has been marketing proven green screen applications. Our marketing group demanded a more modern look of these same products, in order to maintain our highly competitive position.

Thanks to BCD's WebSmart, our employees have been able to excel beyond their individual capabilities. In less than three months, we've been able to modernize more than 50% of our four major sellers. When making our decision we needed a web application development tool that was very flexible, easy-to-learn and allowed us to quickly make our major systems browser based without having to take the entire application down.

Another important criteria we wanted was to easily distribute software enhancements to our clients. If we made modifications to the software, those changes need to be made globally to the system. We did not want us or our clients to deal with updating individual PCs.

We found all this and more in BCD's WebSmart -- it's been a real a winner for us!

-- Mary Rooney, President and CEO

Hickory Farms, Inc.

"Great product, tremendous support. Easy-to-use."

-- Colin Haughton

Universal Music Int'l.

"WebSmart is quick to learn and fun to use, yet powerful enough for serious application development. Altogether, WebSmart is an excellent tool for creating new web applications that use the iSeries"

-- Steve Hale

Voice Retrieval & Information Services

"The easiest product on the market to use. Bar none."

-- John Meleky

Airways Freight

"The manual has a tutorial which guides you through the development of a hypothetical bookstore application while you are learning PML. You can be totally unfamiliar with WebSmart but at the point where you've completed the tutorial, you are totally conversant with the language and all the functional areas. You may not know every trick and nuance but you can certainly be productive, almost immediately.
"It took only 4 days from not having ever seen the software to a complete production application that was ready to be used by agents & customers.
"WebSmart writes RPG which is pretty amazing. Then you use PML (ProGen Macro Language) to program, that to a PC guy looks like C++. When you have finished developing your application, you compile (the program) on the AS/400 which creates a CGI script that runs quickly and doesn't load up the machine."

-- Lee Gillow, Sr. P/A

Weigh-Tronix

"Unlike other vendors, BCD let us evaluate the product without first making a financial commitment: WebSmart is that simple to use.There is nothing to get in the way of successfully building a site.and the templates were of great help. After you compile your program, you can modify the RPG source it creates with PML. It's all very straightforward."

-- Duane Danner

"With the reasonable acquisition cost of WebSmart it was easily cost justified. Our customers love it and we are very pleased with the end result. It has allowed us to do things that we didn't think we could afford to do."

-- Dolly Newville, MIS Manager

Custom Systems Corporation

"BCD let us take a copy with for evaluation. When we got back to our office we loaded it onto one of our smaller development machines and in one evening we had developed a nice inquiry application--all with temporary codes. The functionality we were looking for was definitely there and it was a lot less expensive than the other tools. PML (ProGen Macro Language) is very easy to learn. The templates also made it easy. Pick a file, pick a field, compile and it generates a bunch of PML. As a programmer, you can look at the output and figure it out from there.
"We're super happy with WebSmart's performance. WebSmart does not require a large AS/400 like other products. ProGen WebSmart runs directly compiled programs with no intermediate middleware layers in between. Also, it runs Native ILE programs."

-- Nathan Quinones, Application Developer/Partner

Tricots Liesse

"I recall about two years ago when I was at a crossroad. I had a mandate to create an intranet Web site. IBM insisted that their Domino suite of products was the easiest and fastest path to my desired goals, which was to leverage my already existing AS/400 data files and applications.
"Purchasing the Domino Developer license was one of my biggest mistakes. Domino was not fast and certainly not easy. A short time later I discovered BCD's WebSmart. They too made similar claims of fast and easy but liked their approach to extending existing applications to the web. I loaded and tried the product, followed the user guide and templates and the product actually worked as claimed - fast and easy! I was able to create my first executable application in less than a couple of hours. We were very impressed. We have since put our entire application on the web for our inhouse staff and sales team using WebSmart and have excellent system response. I certainly do recommend this product and BCD to anyone looking to bring their applications to the web. BCD's support and know how have been of great help."

-- Ellery Soifer, Manager, Information Systems

Builders Notice Corporation

"ProGen WebSmart has been the most complete tool I have ever implemented. The pre-built templates allowed me to have working web programs in minutes. The well-written user manual gave me the background to customize the site. I had a complete system built in weeks instead of many months. The generated programs are extremely efficient, and in over a year have never halted. With the iSeries web server and WebSmart we have a complete solution."

-- Jim Franz, Application Development Manager

Morven Partners

"We have addressed both of our immediate requirements by implementing a powerful website for consumers and commercial customers on the Internet, and then extending it as an intranet solution for the mail order division. We found the templates that were included in the product very useful. We wanted to put all our products into a database and maintain that database throughout the web. We were able to use their maintenance templates to help us maintain the page ourselves. The tool set is organized well and steps you through different levels. It's rare to find a company like BCD that works with the customers. They are very thorough and prompt."

-- Gary Hook, MIS Manager

Canadian Kawasaki

"We were looking at WebSphere but training and development would have taken a long time. We experimented a little with Web Facing but it was finicky. WebSmart was easy to use. "It's very user friendly. The functions are similar to RPG functions. We spent the most making the pages look good, but for all the background processes, it was pretty simple."

-- Thierry Gosset, Programmer/Analyst
Read the Snapshot in Productivity »

Bristol Hospital

"The templates are supreme. You can develop things just by clicking and the end results really impress people. To write real applications though, you need to learn PML. Also a background in HTML is a plus, especially to add your own look and feel to the page created by the template, place images and so on. Some of my applications are pretty complex and you need to know your way in and out of WebSmart programs to write them-- you need to understand SMURFS- BCD's version of cookies, parameter passing in web pages and a number of concepts native to web development no matter what the tool used. If you are doing a straightforward application that lets users add, delete and change data in a DB2 table you can do it in a few clicks and you're done."

-- Jorge A. Machado, Manager, Applications and Programming Services
Read the Snapshot in Productivity »

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