I have a question for you. When did restaurants decide that, while you’re eating dinner, you would really enjoy looking at farm implements and auto parts hanging from the walls? Did they think someone might be sitting there, munching on his supper, and thinking to himself, “Boy! This is a good steak, but it’d sure go down better if I had a rusty old license plate to stare at!”
What I think when I’m in a restaurant that has a bumper from a ’65 Mustang dangling precariously over my head is somebody needs to find a place to store all that junk. The same thought runs through my head whenever I go into someone’s office and see stacks of reports sitting all over the place. You’ve probably been in an office like that, too. It’s the one where there’s no place to sit except behind the desk because all the chairs are stacked chest-high with reports. And you just know that most of those mountains of reports sitting on the floor will never be used for anything more than a place to stack other reports. What a cruddy system. If you have users at your company who do this, take heart. There are better ways out there to store reports: OL (online) rather than OF (on floor).
EDMSuite OnDemand
IBM’s EDMSuite OnDemand for AS/400 may be the answer you are looking for to help you store and retrieve reports and other hard-copy data. Actually, the EDMSuite OnDemand is much more than a simple document storage system. It’s a complete, comprehensive document management system. EDMSuite OnDemand captures and retrieves spool files and other documents and also serves as a repository for other types of data, including Binary Large Objects (BLOBs), such as .wav sound files, .mpeg movie files, and other nonstandard data. EDMSuite OnDemand lets you store all of these objects on optical media for immediate retrieval. IBM has been offering this functionality, Computer Output to Laser Disk (COLD) storage, in one form or another for several years now. The EDMSuite OnDemand is the latest and greatest incarnation of it. For more information, visit www.software.ibm.com/data/ondemand/ about_as400.html.
A smaller, but no less useful, package is RVI from Real Vision Software (www.realvisionsoftware.com). RVI is a document imaging system that lets you store and
RVI
retrieve spool files and other image files on optical disk. This RPG/Visual Basic (VB)- based system is easy to use and manage. It allows you to capture AS/400 spool files and computer image types (such as .jpg, .gif, and .tif) from other sources, such as desktop imaging. This means you can store and index scanned documents, as well as images taken from a digital camera. RVI is available as either a standalone spool file capture system or a complete spool file and image management system. Pick the configuration that’s right for your needs. Even IBM recognizes the quality and usefulness of RVI: IBM is the number one reseller of the product! You can order RVI from IBM as Feature Code 5620 ABL. This is a great package, and you won’t have to break your piggy bank to purchase it.
Magellan Software’s SpyView (www.magsoft. com) is another great online document and retrieval management system. SpyView is a nice, feature-rich package. It runs as either a 5250 emulation session or a client/server-type session in a Windows environment. SpyView has some neat features that the others mentioned here don’t. One that I especially like is the burst feature. Essentially, this lets you capture a spool file to a storage media and then electronically burst it into separate pages. That feature alone makes this product invaluable. However, it doesn’t stop there. SpyView offers many more extras, including the ability to add sticky notes and voice annotations to the indexed reports.
There are many other document management systems available. As so often happens though, there isn’t enough room on the printed page to discuss them all. Others you might want to look into include MIRROR IMAGE from 38 Caliber, ColdXtender from OTG Software, and Intelligent Print Routing from Application Integration Management, Inc. These are just a few of the many document management/image management products and vendors out there. Check the Midrange Computing Online Yellow Pages at www.midrangecomputing.com/yellowpages/ for more information.
Full Circle
Online document management systems can easily pay for themselves: They can save time and work; secure information from loss and prying eyes; and build goodwill between the IT staff and users, who will no longer have to physically track down lost reports. Using an online system for your reports will also save thousands of trees every year. Because those trees won’t need to be cut down and made into paper, that paper won’t be used to print a report that will wind up at the bottom of the pile in someone’s office, never to be seen again. As an added benefit, all those saved trees can be used to build more restaurants, which, in turn, can hang more junk from their walls, thereby saving valuable landfill space. Wow! From cleaning up a messy office to protecting the environment, nature comes full circle! Who would have thought a document management system could do so much?
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