System iNetwork

April 28, 2009

BCD Releases New Versions, Expands Features in its IBM i Product Line

Business Computer Design (BCD) is one of the vendors at COMMON Reno that announced it continues to invest in its IBM i product line. BCD made sweeping enhancements to many of the components that form its application modernization suite.

The enhancements include:

Catapult 7. A new release of Catapult, a PC and IBM i client/server application for automated report and document distribution, has been rewritten in Visual #C.NET, resulting in increased performance-- up to15 times faster. The rewrite takes advantage of modern controls and interfaces in C# that, for example, improved the email process. It also has been completely redesigned with a modern and intuitive user interface and a new Grab Rule Editor that improves the process flow when creating new distribution rules.

Clover 1.6. Clover, BCD’s real-time IBM i web reporting and querying tool, now has the ability to import query definitions from IBM DB2 Web Query for i. The Web Query definitions can be output as real-time web reports, graphs, spreadsheets, or interactive drill downs with optional prompts and filters, bringing new life to existing reports defined in IBM’s query tool. The following query options are all retained: selected fields, file joins, calculated fields, sort fields, comparisons and level breaks. You can further customize and modify the imported queries in the Clover IDE with the codeless SQL wizard. End users can access reports from a browser; no other PC software is required.

Presto 1.27. Presto now supports IBM i 5.1 and higher. Additionally, there is an option to run Presto without needing to install the WebSphere Application Server.

Nexus Portal 3.6. Version 3.6 of Nexus, BCD’s portal for secure and controlled access to enterprise information, is due to be generally available the end of May. This version has many new features, including a Google Search Appliance portlet that lets Nexus users search any network drives they index with the Google Appliance, in addition to the documents in the Nexus ECM. Besides users accessing all their documents from one location, they also get full text searching and search result text previews. Nexus 3.6 also offers performance improvements.

WebSmart PHP. WebSmart PHP’s built-in change management has added support for the FTP path to offer a more complete process. This enhancement automatically directs new content and makes it easier to publish, manage, and organize content on your website.

WebSmart ILE 8. The next version of WebSmart ILE, BCD’s rapid web application development tool, will be generally available June 1. It adds support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), letting users create connections to different LDAP data sources and manage entries in those sources. It also includes new XML functions that simplify XML document processing and parsing. These functions let users open an XML document, parse the document into a tree, retrieve elements and their children, get sets and subsets of elements, traverse the document tree, and more. The functions also handle all memory management behind the scenes, so developers can focus on writing applications.

--Rita-Lyn Sanders, Senior Industry Editor, Programming & Systems Management

Posted by rsanders at April 28, 2009 7:16 PM