EverGreen/400 Supports Domino Calendaring
Green screen users need not be excluded from the wealth of functions offer by Lotus Domino, as Inventive Designers (San Diego) offers access to Domino's calendar interface with the latest release of EverGreen/400.
V1R3 of EverGreen/400 features a 5250 green screen calendar interface to Domino for the AS/400, further tightening the integration of Domino with the AS/400. This new release also features a MultiServer option designed to incorporate existing support for multiple standard e-mail servers and dial-up servers into a separate toolkit. AS/400 installations now have the capability to customize their configurations according to specific e-mail requirements.
"This new release of EverGreen/400, is really the result of our close relationship and ongoing dialog with various divisions within IBM and their perceived requirements of the AS/400 market," says Ken Akren, VP of worldwide business development for Inventive Designers. "Demonstrative of this fact is a referral to EverGreen/400 from the IBM OfficeVision/400 migration team within their own new release announcements on February 9. Inventive Designers is dedicated to supporting the success of the OfficeVision/400 migration team and the IBM Domino for the AS/400 marketing efforts."
IBM's February 9, 1999, announcement -- number 299-029 -- promotes the company's OfficeVision to Lotus Notes Migration Tools for AS/400, Version 2, as a "robust set of tools enabling OfficeVision/400 customers to upgrade to the power of Lotus Notes." The announcement also indicates to the AS/400 user base that Inventive Designers is providing the capability to use Lotus Notes mail (including MIME attachments) and calendar from a 5250 terminal or emulation session through its EverGreen/400 product.
Despite much of the publicity surrounding thin clients with graphical user interfaces, Akren is still a firm believer in the reliability of green screens, which still serve a large segment of IBM's AS/400 users. For this reason, Inventive Designers is working to enable e-business for green screen users. "We've been working closely with IBM and Lotus to enable green screen functions on Domino," Akren says.
"We have observed a high level of customer demand to integrate Lotus Domino calendars into a traditional AS/400 5250 environment for quite some time," says Guy Dehond, managing director for Inventive Designers. "And we made a commitment to IBM on delivering this solution to assist with their OV migration and Domino for the AS/400 marketing efforts. Now, with this release, we should overcome one of the last remaining objects preventing AS/400 customers from strategically planning their upgrades to Domino."
One Inventive Designers customer is currently taking the new interface into consideration. Bass Pro Shops (Springfield, Mo.) has 800 Lotus Notes users and 300 EverGreen/400 users, all of which access Domino running on an AS/400 S20 2166.
Bass Pro Shops, which has been using V1R1 of EverGreen/400 since September of last year, plans to migrate to V1R3 of the software in April or May of this year, according to Paul Fenstermacher, technical support manager for Bass Pro Shops. "One of our human resources people is looking at it now to determine what she has to do for training and updating the manual and things like that," he says.
Bass Pro Shops uses Lotus Notes for e-mail, for calendar schedules and as a resource database where users can schedule conference rooms. "Green screen users cannot currently schedule their own meetings using the scheduling feature, although they can receive an e-mail invitation to a meeting once it has been scheduled by a Notes user," according to Fenstermacher. With the new release of EverGreen/400, green screen users will have the capability to access the Notes calendaring feature on their own.
Effective May 31, 2001, IBM plans to discontinue program services for the following programs licensed under the IBM Customer Agreement: OV/400 Version 4, program numbers 5769-WP1 and 5649-WP3; and OV JustMail for OS/400, Version 4. OS/400 V4R4 is the last release of the operating system that OV/400 and OV JustMail for OS/400 will support. IBM is encouraging customers to migrate to Lotus Notes clients and the native AS/400 Domino server.