Re: Pulling spool files off AS/400 - VB?

[George Kinney <GKinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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>Currently brokers will call us up, ask for a quote, we will do it, print it
out and fax it back to them.

There are oodles of AS/400 fax packages out there. Every issue of iSeries is
lousy with ads for them from cover to cover.

>The COO wants to make this a paperless transmission.

>So, out of a brainstorm session, I decided the best solution was to have
the
>quote program spit out the quote print to a unique outqueue.  I would have
a
>VB program that the person can open to view that specific outqueue, select
>the job he wants, save it to his desktop and then he can email it off to
the
>broker.

I saw a few other people mention the Symtrax product (Compleo). We use it
here in support
of a just-in-time inventory ordering system for a local auto manufacturer.
They dump a print
job from an OS/390 system over a dialup to a virtual printer on our old
AS/400, and we pick it up and pass it to an EDI system running on win98. 9+
months uptime and not a single hiccup yet. Only caveats are that the clients
are windows only (not a prob. for a VB developer I'm sure), and that it is
fairly pricey. But it is very simple to install and configure, and will do
just about anything you can imagine. (email, parsing, renaming, merging,
etc.)

>Emailing from the AS/400 is not an option.  I would prefer to write my own
>client side application as opposed to using Ops Nav, due to the fact that
it
>is not a toy everyone should be playing with.

Why do you have to use Ops Nav for emailing from the 400? A while back there
was a posting in news:comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc from a group that does
commercial software, but also had instructions and code for setting up a
DataQueue with an OutQ and routing the print jobs to email. Very easy to do.
You can check it out yourself at: http://www.bytware.com/freestuff.htm
(Don't worry. The source code and info are free)

If I'd have seen this code way back, we could have saved ourselves the $10K
we spent on Compleo.