Re: Calling Report and Viewing Output from a PC

from Al Macintyre

There are a large number of products that take 400 spool file reports & 
transfer them to the PC world.  You need to check the major trade press for 
articles comparting these products to see which features are best for you, 
such as July 1999 AS/400 Magazine or Summer 1999 quarterly buyers guide from 
News/400.

We happen to use MONARCH but there are tons of competitors.  With MONARCH, we 
can send any AS/400 report via e-mail to our auditors, or transfer data to a 
PC spread sheet.  But I do not think MONARCH is good enough for your 
purposes.  

With our version of it, some human being has to do the operator job function 
of clicking on spool file report & clicking on what PC function it is 
supposed to go to - there is some human interface time there, which could be 
a bottleneck if you have enough users who want a report but do not want to 
get it themselves, or if management can't cough up $300.00 per user, or 
whatever the seat cost is to extend this ability to any 400 user with a PC.

What I think you want is some job that runs on AS/400 & automatically grabs 
spool files & copies them via something like MONARCH & sticks them onto a PC 
network server so that instead of end user getting their data from the AS/400 
they get it from the PC network, and then you also need some software, or 
operator job to clean up the mess of whatever was sent to the PC network 
after the spool files are ancient.

I do not think you are going to be able to deliver the reports direct to the 
client PCs of end users in an economically satisfying manner.  The users are 
going to have to click on an icon to get the reports from some PC network 
alternative to clicking on an icon to get into the AS/400.

>  From:    JGiusto@patuxent.com (Joe Giusto)
>  
>  We have recently eliminated an operator position, 
>  and I have now been asked to take some of the reports 
>  and allow the users to view them on the PC by
>  clicking on an Icon on the windows desktop.
>  They do not want to have to bring up a Client Access session and log on to
>  run these reports.
>  
>  I have started playing with FTP 's Quote RCMD and have had mixed results.
>  I am able to get a program to run that generates the spooled file, then I
>  get stuck on how to get it back to the PC user to be viewed on screen.
>  
>  I would appreciate and suggestions from the list to help me out with ideas
>  on how to approach this.
>  
>  Thank you,
>  
>  
>  Joe Giusto II
>  Patuxent Publishing Company

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor

Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days the statue.
Murphy's Mom brought wrong baby home from hospital so it should be Kelly's 
Law.

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