In
Flight Magazine - November 2002
In
Flight Magazine - November 2002
This is the hottest news about PKZIP in a long time! Besides the magnificent new logo, there have been some remarkable developments in the world of PKZIP this month. You can read all about it at www.pkware.com . In a nutshell, the big news is that Ascent Solutions Inc (the developers of PKZIP for AS400, mainframe and Unix) and PKWARE Inc (the original developers of PKZIP for PC and the company that defines the PKZIP standard) have now merged under the PKWARE name. This means that PKZIP is now available across all the major platforms from a single source.
This is really good news for corporate users of PKZIP. All the functions of PKZIP on each platform are now available or in the final stages of development for all the other platforms. So an archive created on the mainframe can be encrypted before it is sent to a PC running PKZIP-Pro. PKZIP for the PC focuses on professional and business applications, unlike its competitor WinZip, a popular compression utility for personal use. Besides file encryption (including the new AES standard), PKZIP-Pro also has automatic integration with MS-Outlook and will soon have automatic integration with Lotus Notes. You may already have seen that in any emails that we have sent you recently - it means that, when you send an email larger than about 64K, PKZIP will automatically convert all the attachments into a single zip archive before sending it. That's much easier than having to zip the files into an archive manually before sending them and it is much easier for someone unacquainted with zipping to use. And it means that your email will arrive faster and tie up your network for far less time.
Rather than go on for hours about all the great things that PKZIP can do for your company, here are a few links that will tell you a lot of what you want to know. You can also send an email to pkzip@mycroft.co.nz for more info.
You can download PKZIP-Pro from the PKWARE web site or, if you'd rather have a CD, give us a call. Naturally, corporate licenses for larger volumes are available at http://www.pkware.com/vlicense/
The big news at the Aperture User's Conference in Las Vegas last month was the announcement of Aperture Version 8, due to be shipped at the beginning of 2003. The main focus of version 8 has been a huge speed-up in access to external databases such as SQL Server and Access. This makes it viable to use an external database as the repository for all your Aperture tables which has many advantages. These include the ability to use tools that come with your enterprise database to maintain those tables as well as providing a central data repository accessible from a wide range of applications. While there is no formal announcement on the subject, I would hazard a guess that, if you currently keep your tables in an external database or are thinking of moving them there, I would do nothing to discourage you.
A round of spontaneous applause for this one. With the current version of Aperture, it is easy enough to create a legend for a drawing so that, for example, each department is filled in with a different colour. What can be a pain in the elbow is when you have dozens of departments in your company but only 3 or 4 in any one drawing. Do you create a legend for each drawing or one that covers your whole company so that you have lots of entries in the legend for departments that don't exist in the drawing?
Well, now you needn't bother with any of that because version 8 has Dynamic
Legends. With Dynamic Legends, you create one legend for your entire project
that applies to each kind of colouring you want to do. For example, you may
create a Department legend for your floorplans and a Breaker loading legend
for your power distribution boards. In the example below, we're in the process
of moving the MIS department into room 205 - note how it has also automatically
been added to the legend and that the legend doesn't show any departments that
aren't in this drawing.
Here's how you do it. (This is a 45 minute presentation in 100 words or less).
Keep an eye out for the new Aperture Visual Portals. These are fully read-write web-enabled interfaces to Aperture that will let you build data centre and facilities management projects that are open to anybody you want to give access to (and to nobody else!) This means that you will be able to create work orders, have the right people notified that a work order has been raised and then have them progress the work order through to completion or re-assign it to somebody else. More on that next year...
We've had a huge amount of interest lately in z/Web-Host and z/XML-Host as ways of web-enabling mainframe applications. The same questions have been asked over and over again so, in the spirit of FAQs, here's the answers to a couple of Frequently Asked Questions.
What do they work with?
Both products take ordinary 3270 data streams and convert them to an HTML or
XML form that is needed for display on a PC. When the user sends his data back,
it gets converted to a 3270 data stream for the host application to process.
Your programs can interact with IBM’s Websphere, Microsoft’s BizTalk
Server, or even exploit SOAP servers or applications in Microsoft’s .Net
architecture. All without changing a single line of code in your existing applications!
So does that mean I don't
have to change any mainframe application code at all? You don't miss much
- you don't have to change a single line of code, recompile anything or change
any system tables. Or anything else. At all. Nothing.
What about non-CICS transactions?
All we need is a 3270 data stream so it doesn't matter if it's coming from
CICS, ISPF, Solve, Vital Signs, FileMarvel, Natural, IMS/DC or anywhere else.
What about security? It's
as secure as running your transactions on a real 3270 - everything goes through
RACF and any intermediate firewalls you've got on your system.
How long between installing
it and being able to use it? An hour (and that includes your lunch break).
You can set up tailored screens such as those you will find in the
demo
or you can use the default screen layout that simply reproduces the 3270 layout
with the colour scheme of your choice on a web browser.
You make it sound too easy.
No I don't.
It's always dangerous to whinge about anything American - if you don't believe me, try telling my American wife that the dress she's wearing makes her look fat. But here goes. My whinge this month is about air-conditioning in America.
I take my hat off to whoever invented air-conditioning (the Americans will claim that they did, along with powered flight, television, the jet engine and the car). The first couple of times I came across it, it was fun to play with, too. But could the operators of American hotels and restaurants please get over the novelty? I've just got home from 4 glorious weeks in the USA where I ate too much, stayed up too late and (once I had persuaded a large number of barmen that Budweiser is not what I mean when I ask for a beer) [Watch it - that's 3 whinges already: Ed] slaked my thirst excessively. What has me confused is why I had to wear jeans and a sweat shirt in Miami and Las Vegas where the temperature was in the 30s (or in the 80s in the old money). OK, so you can knock 15 degrees off the outside temperature to make your restaurant uncomfortably cold. Big deal. What the heck does that achieve, other than huge inconvenience for your customers?
And the Oscar for "Services to the Electrical Industry" goes to the restaurant with no outside walls that we went to in Clearwater, FL but which had - tada! - an air-conditioner going full pelt.
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