News & Views, July 2000

We are pleased to announce a new program for mrc customers who want to Web-enable their businesses but don’t know where to start or don’t have the time. This Web-Enabled Business Opportunity (Web-O) will allow you to see a prototype of your intranet, extranet, or Internet Web site live, with no further obligation.

You’ll see how your Web site could look and perform, using the tool suite you already own, in a Web environment, such as your company intranet, your business to business extranet, or even your Internet site on the World Wide Web. With Web-O, you can:

• See a risk-free prototype of your intranet, extranet, or Internet Web site
• Discover how easy it is to Web-enable your existing business applications
• Explore the possibilities of the Internet with no further obligation

To take advantage of this special offer, contact mrc at 630-916-0662 or click here.

Most of you take advantage of the extensive report writing capabilities of the mrc-Productivity Series. Using the report formatter, you’ve probably invested a lot of time formatting those reports to make them look attractive. Many people think that Web-based information distribution will replace those original reports, which may be true for those who aren’t using the mrc-Productivity Series. Fortunately for mrc customers, you can easily include your green-screen reports in your strategy to distribute information via your intranet, extranet, or the Internet.

We recently announced a command that simplified converting a report from its green-screen state to an HTML or PDF document that could be viewed over an intranet, extranet, or the Internet using standard Web browsers (and the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader™ plug-in, for PDF files). This command, MRCRPTSND, also simplified the distribution of the report, by allowing you to send the file to your IFS or to the appropriate e-mail addresses. MRCRPTSND runs a standard mrc report, converts the spool file to HTML or PDF, and then distributes the report in the mode you have chosen – to the IFS or to the specified e-mail addresses.

The MRCRPTSND automatically converts the spool file to a very basic HTML file. This HTML file is completely Web-ready and is very easy to distribute. However, you may want the Web versions of your reports to have a bit more formatting than their green-screen report equivalents. With a basic knowledge of HTML, you can easily improve the look of your reports by adding bold column headings, italicized text, numbers whose colors will change if they are positive or negative, a company logo, graphics, links to other Web pages, and more.

You might be surprised to discover that you can easily do this today, using the mrc report formatter with which you are already familiar and the basic HTML tags that are provided in this newsletter. Figure 1 shows the Report Free Formatting screen. HTML character formatting tags (<b>, </b>, <i>, etc) have been added to the layout as literal text (using F5) to the text and/or fields enclosed by the tags. They become effective when the report is viewed as an HTML file through the browser, although the tags themselves are not visible. Do keep in mind that the HTML tags must appear somewhere on the green-screen report (as in figure 1), so there must be space available to place them in the report’s format. The HTML tags will not appear on the HTML view of the file but will impart their characteristics to the text/data that they surround. If the report is to run in both green-screen and Web environments and you plan to apply more than minimal HTML formatting, you might consider having two versions of the report (one with HTML tags and one without). However, if you apply only minimal HTML formatting, one report should serve both environments very well.

Basic HTML

HTML is a simple markup language that tells your browser how the contents of a Web page should be displayed. HTML uses opening and closing tags to surround the text between these tags with the desired format.

Click here for examples of basic HTML tags.

mrc offers training sessions at both your location and ours. Visit our education area for more information on our education services, or click herevisit to view our schedule for the entire year. (You will have to log in with your user name and password to visit this area. If you need login instructions, please click here first.)