News & Views, June 2000

The push for businesses to integrate their production data with their Internet presence increases daily. While many companies have rushed to deploy costly e-business solutions, others have resisted the hype and are waiting for a solution that will truly benefit their businesses. For companies that believe that the cost, risk, and time associated with modernizing business systems are too great to take lightly, the wait is over.

Reduce Cost

The Gartner Group estimates the cost of building an e-business to be from $300,000 to $30,000,000. With all the software, hardware, and consulting options out there, it's no wonder that companies have spent that much money. But you don't have to.

The mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰ caps these costs. The tool suite generates the Java, CGI, HTML, and RPG code needed to run Web applications that provide native DB2/400 access. The ability to build these applications on your AS/400 allows you to modernize your business with your existing staff.

Companies that have generated their Web applications with the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰ report substantial cost savings. A major cable and wire manufacturer considered moving to NT until they found the costs of a new system, training, staff, and software to be ten times greater than the cost of implementing the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰ tool suite on their existing system. Another customer looked at Java-only application development software in the $100,000 range before finding that mrc's software could generate Java, CGI, and HTML applications for a fraction of that cost. Many companies became mrc customers after deploying another e-business solution only to discover that it was too difficult to use and the expense of consultants was costing them more than the original software.

For your free ROI analysis, e-mail the mrc sales department at sales@mrc-productivity.com.

Reduce Risk

Many companies are leery of implementing new technologies until it has become an industry standard. Even then, their shelf life may be brief. Considering the costs involved in traditionally developing and deploying applications, reluctance to disrupt status-quo prevails.

With its Open Template architecture, the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰ generates all the code for many industry standard programming languages, requiring no training or staff investment from you. The ease with which applications can be developed and re-developed in any language minimizes the risk involved in adopting those new technologies. The product-lookup Visual Basic applications of yesterday are effortlessly converted to Java with the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰. Similarly, the Web-based order-entry applications generated in Java today may simply be recompiled in the programming language of the future.

See how easy it is to build Web applications at www.mrc-productivity.com/products/.

Reduce Time

AS/400-based organizations face a tremendous challenge in their e-business strategies: time. Success depends upon immediate deployment, yet the technologies needed are relatively new to traditional IS departments.

The mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰ addresses this challenge with an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, menu-driven interface. The user simply enters his application specifications, and the application code is generated automatically, without any manual programming on the part of the user.

Companies that develop their business applications with the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰ realize tremendous time savings. A Java programmer from a major film manufacturing company simultaneously builds RPG and Java applications in less than an hour with the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰; he estimates that those same applications would have taken him days to program manually. An IS Director from a nationwide merchandise servicing company built all his e-business applications in three weeks. By hand, he estimates they'd have taken six to eight months.

For more examples of mrc's customers' successes, visit www.mrc-productivity.com/customers/.

Build a Better Web Site

The Internet provides a powerful ability to communicate with anyone a company might conduct business with, from anywhere in the world, at any time of day. You can extend the reach and value of your business at a lower cost, reduced risk, and in less time with the award-winning productivity software of choice: the mrc-Productivity Series²⁰⁰⁰. What are you waiting for?

For more information, visit www.mrc-productivity.com.

The mrc development team frequently builds enhancements to the mrc-Productivity Series, including External Objects, commands, templates, and new technologies. A recently built External Object called OEMAILEXMP is one such enhancement. This external object demonstrates how to send an e-mail message from the AS/400 and shows how to set up the parameters for the IBM SNDDST command. While this External Object likely cannot be implemented directly into your specific application as is, it does show how to use e-mail in a real-world application. Although this object could be called anywhere, this article’s example application calls the object immediately after adding a record to the database.

Some of you have already seen this External Object in action and didn’t realize it! On the mrc Web site, a user can request an MRCCH (mrc cumulative software update) using an mrc-generated Java maintenance application. This application calls the OEMAILEXMP object and passes data to the object. The object then uses that data to send an e-mail message to one of our staff members, informing us that someone has just requested a cumulative software update.

The program uses the Contact Name and Company Name fields for building the message for the e-mail. It uses the e-mail address passed in as the Internet e-mail address in the SNDDST command. In this particular application, the e-mail address is a default value in the definition of the object - we hard-coded a staff member’s address as the default parameter. Certainly, that value could come from a calculation, a true database field, or be hard-coded into the object’s source code. You can view the source code of this External Object, and download it for your own use from the mrc software download section of our Web site.

For this example, let’s look at how this External Object was implemented into our program. When building the maintenance application, we chose option 8, "External Objects," from the "Application Options" menu. After adding the appropriate object, we are prompted with the "Assign Fields to Object Parameters" menu, as shown in Figure 1. In this screen shot, we see the three parameters that can be mapped to the application’s fields. The parameter labeled "Email" is not required, but could be mapped to field #3, Contact Email, in order to send a message to that address. In this example, however, we’ve chosen to assign one e-mail address as a default parameter, as shown in Figure 2.

By choosing option 44, "Work with External Objects," from the mrc main menu, we are able to update the object parameters. By opening the "Parameter Definition" menu for the Email parameter, we are able to provide a default e-mail address to which our application will send e-mail messages. If you look at this object’s source code on our Web site, you’ll see that we also hard-coded some text, along with the variables of Name and Company, to be passed to the object.

Please note that your AS/400 needs to be configured to send e-mails for this object to work properly. We are happy to help with that simple task for a nominal fee. Otherwise, you may contact IBM for support or documentation.

If you want to receive an e-mail notice every time someone adds, updates, or deletes records in your database files - perhaps an order’s just been placed, or a new contact name has been added to your customer database - then this month’s technical article is for you! You’ll want to read that article too if you’d like your AS/400 to send e-mail messages to customers or end-users. Perhaps after your customer service representative enters a phoned-in order, both the rep and the customer receive an e-mail detailing the order. Or your staff receives an e-mail whenever a sales report gets updated. Whatever you want to do, mrc will help you do it!

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.)