Celview Clears View from Macintosh to AS/400
Thanks to the efforts of Cel Corp. (Edmonton, Alberta), enterprise environments that want to connect Apple Macintosh systems to mainframe or AS/400 hosts have a compelling new option. Version 2.0 of the company’s client-to-host communications software suite, Celview, now provides support for new PCI-based Power Macintosh computers running versions 8.1 and up of Apple’s Mac OS.
In the past, organizations that wanted to facilitate access to AS/400 minicomputer or S/390 mainframe hosts from client/server LANs typically had only a limited number of solutions at their disposal. Most such client-to-host connectivity packages consisted of a middleware operating system, usually either Microsoft’s Windows NT, NetWare from Novell Inc. (Orem, Utah) or OS/2 from IBM—running SNA gateway software. These approaches typically left Macintosh clients at the mercy of yet another disparate man-in-the-middle platform.
Enter Celview 2.0 for Macintosh, a terminal emulation solution that facilitates communications between Macintosh clients and mainframe or AS/400 environments. New in Celview is support for Apple’s latest-generation Mac OS 9, as well as complete support for IP printing.
According to Cel Corp. president and CTO Bruce Matichuk, his company’s core competency has historically consisted of providing quality solutions for Apple’s Macintosh platform. As Matichuk tells it, that’s not going to change any time soon.
“Cel Corp. supports the Mac environment, and will continue to provide the best quality terminal emulation solutions that the market has to offer," says Matichuk. "With Celview 2.0, users will have the most options for linking their Macs with a host of legacy data."
Celview 2.0 is packed with a number of host connectivity amenities that allow users to take advantage of strengths and features specific to either AS/400 minicomputer or S/390 mainframe hosts. The AS/400 Edition of Celview 2.0, for example, includes support for session device naming, a capability that Cel Corp. representatives say allows users to request a specific session or printer name to be assigned for display or printer connections. And as far as mainframe compatibility is concerned, Celview 2.0 Mainframe Edition provides support for logical unit (LU) association, which enables users to connect to a specific display and/or a printer session on a mainframe host.
Also in the area of host-based printing, both the AS/400 and Mainframe editions of Celview 2.0 provide what Cel Corp. describes as “comprehensive” printing capabilities. According to company representatives, both products enable users to print data from any AS/400 or mainframe application over TCP/IP to a Macintosh computer. Moreover, Cel Corp. officials say, IP printing is functional with hosts supporting both the 5250e and 3270e data streams.
One Celview customer is Bass Hotels & Resorts, a subsidiary of Bass PLC (London), a hospitality services company that owns the Holiday Inn chain of hotels. Because it determined to revamp its call center technology, Bass Hotels & Resorts subsequently required a faster, more universally available method of providing access to mainframe data in its heterogeneous environment. As a result, the company chose to implement Celview to link more than 1,500 desktop computers at its Holiday Inn worldwide call centers—situated, among other locales, in Japan and the Netherlands—with an S/390 Mainframe located in the United States.
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