Impressive Web, SmartPhone, and report distribution features added to interim software update.
In the spirit of the holiday season, New Generation Software, Inc. (NGS) is giving its customers and ISVs an unexpected–but sure-to-be appreciated–gift in the form of enhancements to its popular NGS-IQ business intelligence solution. The new features significantly expand customers’ ability to easily add Web self-service, SmartPhone compatibility, and enhanced report distribution, according to the company. These features are available to all customers and ISVs on current maintenance.
“We decided to surprise our customers by adding these new features to an NGS-IQ Release 7.00 update we were preparing to ship," said Bernard Gough, NGS president and CEO. "Normally, new functions of this magnitude are delivered as part of a major release, not a release update," he said. "But our developers were able to add some amazing new features to the software more quickly than expected. With the demand for Web 2.0 capabilities and SmartPhone access to the IBM i growing every day, we decided our customers should have these benefits immediately rather than later,” Gough said.
The release update enables Web and SmartPhone users to generate Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF output on demand and gives Web application developers additional, easy-to-learn NGS-IQ Web keywords that they can embed in their HTML code to add run-time query execution to their Web applications, portals, and home pages, the company said. Depending on user requirements, developers and NGS’ ISV business partners can customize NGS-IQ’s run-time Web reporting to prompt for variable input, including record selection criteria, new field calculation formulas, output type (Excel, PDF, HTML), and output destination. Developers can use these prompting options to design queries that enable end users to write personalized e-mail messages and enter ad-hoc recipient lists at run time without having to modify the underlying query or request technical assistance. NGS-IQ’s Web interface supports on-demand query execution and report delivery to SmartPhones, including various models from Blackberry, Apple (iPhone), and others.
NGS also enhanced the query development environment so query authors can instruct the software to insert the current value of database fields or fields defined in the query into the “from", “to", “cc”, “bcc”, “subject”, and “message” lines when designing a query that will distribute output to one or more e-mail addresses upon execution. The NGS-IQ e-mail report distribution feature requires SMTP on the IBM i but does not require customers to use the IBM i as their e-mail server. E-mail users can receive NGS-IQ output from virtually any e-mail client software, including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Domino, and Mozilla Thunderbird.
“It’s exciting to show our customers and business partners how easy it is to connect their IBM i to the Web and quickly give employees, customers, vendors, and others the ability to query their data," said John O’Sullivan, NGS vice president of Technology. "Some have considered doing this, but (they) thought it would be difficult and time-consuming,” he said.
NGS-IQ fully supports IBM i security and also gives customers the option of using the NGS-IQ SeQure security management module to control user access to the database, queries, and query functions like email, FTP, and file download.
NGS has scheduled a “Share & Learn” Webcast for its customers and ISVs on Wednesday, Dec. 9, to introduce these new capabilities. Companies new to NGS can schedule private Web demonstrations.
With over 25,000 IBM i users representing virtually every industry and company size worldwide, NGS has been an industry leader in developing high performance, field-proven software solutions since 1982. NGS-IQ is a versatile, scalable BI suite designed exclusively for the IBM i. The Concert Series is a modular financial accounting system including General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, and Human Resources that can be easily interfaced to custom and third-party business applications. NGS is an Advanced Member of IBM PartnerWorld and a supporter of the iManifest initiative. For more information, visit www.NGSI.com.
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