Re: Help Text and Officevision/400 -- MIDRANGE-L

At 01:11 PM 3/7/01 +0000, you wrote:

There are lots of bad options here. Several points:

Option 1 - A small amount of work (with no $), and a lot of risk:

It's rumored that the install of V5R1 will uninstall OV/400. Although I'm relatively sure (from past experience that RSTLICPGM is smart enough to not let you re-install it), but save/restore is not. So you could trying the following on a "scratch system":

Install OV/400, add some users, yada, yada, yada.
Turn on object auditing.
Save your whole system
DLTLICPGM OV/400
Check your audit logs to see what was deleted.

This will provide you with a TODO list of what to manually reinstall after the install of V5R1 removes OV/400 as rumored. At that point, there OV will not be supported, and there are no guarantees that it will work.

Option 2 - The least amount of risk, (lots of $$$$$) and low risk:

IBM sold the editor, mail/merge and calendaring to a European vendor, but I don't know their name. (It's been posted here before.) You could buy this product for lots of $$$$, and assuming that the product works, you're in.

Option 3 - IBM's preferred approach, moderate risk (very expensive) and moderate risk:

Migrate your help to LOTUS Notes, assuming that all of your applications work from big PCs, and not dumb workstations. Root canal sounds like more fun to me.

Option 4 - Print out your help documents, and migrate then to Text Management/38 - very low risk:

If you already own the product, it costs no $$$$, otherwise it sells for about $6K, not tiered. I know several users that have done this. Use QSYS38/DSPDOC to replace OV's DSPDOC. There will be no re-keying, but there will be editing, clean-up, adding extra lines, highlighting and underlining. F3 will not exit, but enter will. (You will not have to use F1 to exit.) I know of a few companies that have tried this approach, and they say it worked well. They used programmers to convert the text to source, and had clericals who know the application edit the source for prettiness.

Al

Hi all,
        We are currently using the HLPDOC keyword in our display file dds to
enable users to display the appropriate helptext for a field or function.
In light of the withdrawal of OV/400 from the scene by IBM, the displaying
of these 'Office' documents could potentially be problematic for our
application if they do not work after v4r5. Does anyone know what will
happen on a V5R1 platform when an application that uses Officevision help is
run? Will the program fail immediately or only when F1 is pressed? Will a
nice message be displayed and the function carry on regardless?

        We do not need OV/400 for maintaining or storing our help text as we
can find another approach. For example, we might keep our help text in a
database on the AS/400 or in a text file in QDLS. The real problem is the
runtime usage of OV/400 to display the office document when F1 is pressed.
What we would really like to do is call our own help text program with the
same parameters that must be going to the OV/400 program when F1 is pressed.
This would be the least intrusive solution to our application as we would
not have to change our DDS or our RPG programs.

        Does anyone know of a Red Book or API we can use to solve our
problem ?

Kind regards,
Jeff Bull.
Senior Support Consultant
Certified IBM AS/400 System Administrator
Midas Kapiti International Ltd

Tel:    44 (0) 175 370 8224
Fax:    44 (0) 175 357 0233
Mailto:Jeff.Bull@Midas-Kapiti.Com << == Replies to
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