System iNetwork

February 12, 2008

Some Personal Productivity Tools for System i Remain

I'm a great believer in to-do lists. I come by it naturally, I suppose. My mother was a career woman and actually had to-do lists for the housework because she crammed it all into the weekends. "Here, John," she'd say as she handed me the dust mop on a typical Saturday morning. "Sweep down the stairs," she'd say as she crossed it off her list and moved on to the next item. My to-do lists today tend to have entries like writing articles and memos, and I couldn't do without them as a way of keeping organized.

I'm not alone. According to a survey done by Kelton Research, a marketing research firm, 76 percent of U.S. citizens keep at least one to-do list, and some have more than one. The study, commissioned as a springboard for Microsoft's Windows Mobile Group to promote running to-do lists on mobile phones, points out that to-do lists are a stress-management tool that reportedly has a calming effect on 73 percent of the U.S. respondents who use them. How well to-do lists combat procrastination is a tossup, though, as the U.S. respondents report checking off only 69 percent of the items on their lists in a week, and the average time the longest an item stays on the list is 22 days. (At least the U.K. and Canadian respondents are still ahead of the U.S. folks by keeping items on their lists for up to 26 days.) Other interesting revelations from the study show that women are more likely than men (85 percent to 75 percent) to address the most important items on their lists first, people in Italy are more likely than any other surveyed nationality to tackle the hardest item first, and people in Japan hold themselves to the highest standard in the world, that of having to complete 59 percent of the items on their weekly lists to feel productive.

Reading the results of the survey made me think how rare it has become to see much new information about personal productivity software for the System i. When IBM announced the end of OfficeVision/400 (OV/400) in 1999 (yes, it has been that long, although actual phase-out was delayed a bit longer) as a way of promoting Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft's ubiquity in the area of personal productivity software became so predominant that its MS Office products have crowded most of the competition right out of the minds of most business people. However, a little research shows that System i users aren't stuck with Microsoft as the only alternative. There are still some personal productivity solutions available that run on the System i. (Just to be clear, I'm not talking about productivity tools for programmers, system managers, or even IT people in general. I simply mean personal time savers for the end user in all of us.)

Let's start with a couple of general-purpose office products. As far back as the 90s, Seacrest Business Systems, Generic Software , and System Support Products (SSPI) have offered office organizers for the System i and its predecessors. Seacrest's DeskMaster is a "complete office system with Internet-capable e-mail, word processing, calendars, and and personal productivity tools." Its Document Integrator offers text editing, text/data merge, and APIs to add those capabilities to existing apps. (Alas, if you want these products, better hurry. After all these years, Seacrest plans to drop support for them May 1.) Generic Software, despite its merger with WorksRight Software years ago, maintains an independent website on which it offers DeskWorks, a spreadsheet processor, Desk*Top, a personal calendaring and calculator utility, and The Spelling Assistant, a dictionary lookup utility. (I should add, though, that these products haven't been upgraded since the late 90s, by Generic's own admission.) SSPI remains actively in the hunt with OfficeSuite, a collection of OakWord (a word processor), DeskWorks Spreadsheet (an Excel alternative), Desk*Top (Generic's calendaring application), MAIL MANager (an e-mail solution), and Forms Magic, a forms-design product)

Let's move on to some products designed to be OV/400 replacements. Aia Software offers ITP, a document that it still touts as "a complete alternative for OV/400 Data Text Merge" and a migration path for OV/400 documents (for those of who who've let that task slip beyond even the 26th day). Of course, today ITF offers interfaces to MS Office and OpenOffice.org, APIs for integrating with other apps, templates that enable the importing of database data into document fields, eXtensible Markup Language (and numerous file format) outputs, and web services compatibility. Inventive Designers offers DTM, named after Data Text Merge, and which like ITF offers compatibility with Office 2007 and a choice of 15 different output formats to support web, print, fax, e-mail, and archive needs. For those of you who followed IBM's upgrade path to Domino/Notes, SWING Software's InOffice bridges the gap between MS Office and Notes by letting users create Office docs using Notes data, store Office docs in Notes databases, and create group calendar reports and charts, among other abilities. Basic Business Systems offers Office Administration for Lotus Notes Domino, which verges on a human resources app that enables enterprisewide vacation scheduling, timesheet and expense filing, streamlines document creation and associated workflows, and eliminates paper forms. (There are many i5/OS-based document-management solutions too numerous to mention that also fulfill some of these functions, of course, but those are a bit beyond my point.)

Two examples of products that bridge the gap between the System i and MS Word are RJS Software Systems iSeries Office Integrator, which lets users "create letters and mail merges using live System i data and MS Word, call PC commands, launch browser sessions, and copy data to the Windows clipboard," and CPI Software's API Office CPI, which enables the use of the MS Office environment on the System i.

For those remaining on the Lotus train into the Workplace era, Touchtone Corporation offers Wintouch for Workplace, a collaboration enhancer that lets users create and share documents, provides integrated instant messaging, offers access to several major e-mail systems, provides a calendar and address book, and includes role-based team spaces with business templates that users can customize to fill a variety of functions.

You spreadsheet fans have some alternatives, too. In addition to the products already mentioned from Generic and SSPI, Gumbo Software sells Excel-erator, a utility that converts i5/OS database files into spreadsheets in MS Excel format and can deliver them as MIME attachments to e-mail messages. Global Software's Spreadsheet Server provides MS Excel-format spreadsheets for a wide range of ERP and financial applications that run on the System i, including BPCS and products from Infor, Lawson, Oracle/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards, SAP, and others. (I realize I'm glossing over many other products that can download System i spooled data directly into MS Excel. Please see "Solutions That Download iSeries Data to MS Excel," an older but still mostly accurate compilation of those products.)

I don't mean to slight all the report generators, e-mail augmentation products, printing utilities, and other solutions that save end users time and effort and in their own way contribute to end-user productivity. In the final analysis, any software solution does that. However, in the narrow space in which single end users need help organizing their personal data, their personal calendar, and their personal documents, there is still a niche where System i-native solutions that provide these services exist. (And my thanks to our intern Cassie Deemer for her help in researching this topic.)

Posted by at February 12, 2008 2:19 PM