Re: Jacada Seagull and the like

There are a bunch of companies in this business such as
http://www.lansa.com

IBM has several offerings.

The questions you may want to ask include:

Some of my questions are rhetorical for which the next question is how much $
or inconvenience willing to spend to avoid having this or that problem.

Are you using a packaged system or is your software home brew?

If you are one of the 10's of thousands of companies using some standard
software package, there are outfits out there that have ALREADY GUIzed that
particular package & you do not need to do the whole job - you can buy
interfaces already tailored to many major 400 packages.  This is also a good
way to go if the package periodically gets upgrades & enhancements.

Do you want low cost or is price no object?

In other words, a good twinax work station costs less than $1,000.00 & you
can get second hand ones that will last for years if not decades for under
$500.00 but to deliver GUI you need a $3,000.00 PC that will have to be
upgrade replaced every 2-3 years.  Those PCs will need how much memory & how
fast a processor to work your GUI efficiently?  And do not forget to protect
them with UPS & anti-virus & the whole 9 yards that twinax has no need for.
Is your GUIzing worth that extra infrastructure cost?

It is, if the people need PCs for something other than 400 work.

Is performance important to you or do you have unlimited funds to pay your
work force to be twiddling their thumbs waiting for some program to run which
went really fast the old way?

Is your current 400 model optimized for something other than GUI & will you
have to convert to a differently balanced 400 model for this to work
efficiently?

Do you want pretty or do you want productive or do you want both?

Do you want to be able to hire persons who knows Windows or Macintosh but not
400 & not have to teach them how to work the 400 because the application is
fully PCized?

Do you want to stay away from Microsoft technologies that are a magnet for
hackers & computer viruses & that Microsoft track record is particularly bad
with respect to bugs & security hassles?

Do you not want to have to worry about the underlying code, whether it is
HTML or Java or C or whatever, in other words you not want to hire or train a
programmer who knows that stuff, and administrator who knows the pitfalls of
a system running on that protocol, because the Jacada Seagull Lansa IBM etc,
solution uses whatever is the hot XTML Linux methodology of your choice & can
be recompiled in something else if support for Java or C- evaporates.

Do you want to be able to cut & paste between 400 applications & other PC
applications just like we do when 400 is not in the picture?

Example, 400 report to PC spread sheet.
Example, PC e-mail to 400 SNDMSG
Example, PC fax to customer order entry screen

Some GUI upgrades lead to slower for end users because of intermediate
emulations
In other words the GUI is not direct access to the 400 software like IBM
Client Access but the GUI goes to something else that actually runs the 400
software, so that you have added a layer of pretty looking while it actually
takes the work force more time to do the same work.

We have users given GUI but the mouse does not work.

Do you want them to be able to click on a menu option, or function key help
text at bottom of screen & that be the same as keying in that menu option or
function key?

What is a screen scraper & what is wrong with using one?

Will you ever need web browser access to your data by customers, mobile
users, etc.?  Will management appreciate spending $$$ to get this, then find
that it cannot be applied for that & have to spend $$$ again?

Remember that web browser access is not just GUI face lift.
You might not want customer-X to access data about customer-Y
while in-house staff can access any of your customer data with existing 400
code

If you have some legacy software that you use to run the core of your
business & that software periodically gets modified & enhanced, how will you
deliver the enhancements to the GUI version?

Some GUI versions take your 400 code & convert it, then enhance the
conversion for GUI version, which means that if you modify the 400 code, you
will have to go through the GUI conversion again & merge prior GUI
enhancements, or live with a pair of development environments in which
upgrades to the base 400 code are done separately than upgrades to the GUI
version.

Other GUI versions are add ons to your 400 code such that when you upgrade
the 400 version, it is immediately available to the GUI users.

You know that once upon a time computers needed to be in a temperature
humidity zone that was a bit chilly, but today most computers & peripherals
only need what is comfortable for humans.  We have a factory for which the
conditions are not comfortable for humans ... work stations at loading doors
in which temperature humidity wind dust is just like outdoors ... IBM twinax
works fine there, but PC can be a bit fragile there.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)

> We are thinking about buying a package to gui-ize our front end....
>  At the present we are not going the e-business route, but just trying to
>  give the users a prettier interface....
>  I just wanted to know if any of had experience with either Seagull or
>  Jacada
>  and could give some direction on what to ask and any gotchas the sales
>  people tend to forget about....
>  Also, these are the only two companies that I know of who have this type
>  of product.  If there are more please send me information on them...