Vanguard Pushes Document Imaging Envelope
Document imaging has become increasingly commonplace in the AS/400 market, as the Internet provides easy access to graphics for a wide audience of users, and those users in turn have the high-powered desktops needed manage graphical content.
Vanguard Systems (Media, Pa.) continues to feed the market's growing appetite for imaging technology with Release 6.0 of its IMS/21 document image processing solution for the AS/400. With Release 6.0, IMS/21 enables users to link scanned documents, faxes, Office Vision documents, spool files, word processing correspondence and PC graphics to all AS/400 applications.
Vanguard rewrote and upgraded the IMS/21 client code to 32-bit, enabling the product to run on Windows 98, 98 or Windows NT. This accomplished two goals for the product: IMS/21 is now TCP/IP enabled and backward-compatible with previous, 16-bit versions of the product.
"TCP/IP enabling the product did two things for us," says David Engberg, president of Vanguard Systems. "One, it made the product more open. While we don't necessarily support other platforms for the database, that is definitely a possibility available to us now.
"TCP/IP also gave us an addressing scheme where we can integrate with the AS/400 without any Client Access or any NetSoft router required," Engberg continues. "Because it's TCP/IP, [users] don't even need to have an AS/400 application running. We can now service people without AS/400 applications."
Without the need for Client Access or other kinds of IBM protocols on the PC to access the IMS/21 database, Vanguard's product will be able to service a variety of platforms in the future, according to Engberg.
Specific enhancements added to IMS/21 6.0 include: improved PC folio inquiry; zoom window; hand panning; image clean up, while scanning; the capability to re-order scanned pages within a document; personal folios; report distribution; LAN-attached 3995 support; the capability to verify after write to optical; multiple AS/400 environment support; the capability to combine pages for faxing; printer server API; Twain-compliant scanner support; and a technical support Web site for Vanguard customers.
--L. Greenemeier