RE: Iseries Forms design and spool merging software

We've been using JetForms for about 5 years.  A bit of a CPU hog, but it
is 100% 400 based for report conversion; no Windows box required.  I
think you can even do some basic form design on the 400, but I'm not
sure.  Our guy who does the forms does them using the PC interface.  I
think it's got some rudimentary WYSIWYG functions but to do the more
powerful things your kind of stuck editing layout files.  Once you know
what you're doing, it doesn't take too long.  

You can either just examine a report and format it based on what it sees
or embed codes to make it ewasier; we do both.  Canned JDE reports,
which are pretty ugly to our users, come out with text boxes, shading,
etc.  It will even produce color output.  The type of conversion is
determined, in our case anyway, by the form type.

We have it monitor certain outqs and automatically process whatever
appears in them.

We create both PCL & PDF docs with it and copy them to the IFS.  We
serve the reports via a net.data driven web page.  

It is priced per AS/400, not per user/seat/doc.

I will say it's had it's share of bugs over the years, but they've
pretty much all been fixed in the latest release.

JetForms is now owned by Adobe.



-----Original Message-----
From: Stone, Joel [mailto:StoneJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 5:15 PM
To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
Subject: Iseries Forms design and spool merging software

We are considering purchasing a forms design and spool merging software
product.

Does anyone use any of the following products?

Are there any others available that I should look at?


Create!Form                             www.createform.com
        
Acom EzDocs/400                 www.acom.com                    

Formtastic/400                  www.quadrantsoftware.com

eliteForm/400                   www.elitedocuments.com

Winspool/400                    www.rjssoft.com                         

Formsprint/400                  www.formsprint.com


What features should I be asking about?  Here are some preliminary ones
that I thought of.  Can you suggest any other important features that
would be nice to have?

.       No additional charge for each new user or printer
        
        (This is critical because we don't want to limit the
distribution of a successful, popular report.)

.       Tool must support PCL (all normal PC type printers) and
Postscript
type printers, and without any additional hardware      at each printer

.       Tool should be capable of taking a standard spool file and
changing
fonts & adding bar codes WITHOUT program changes.

.       Tool should be capable of doing the above WITH control codes
embedded in the program.

.       Form design tool should be a graphical Windows-based WYSIWYG
tool at
form design stage.

.       Report should successfully print with only an AS/400 working
(without a PC doing any merging or formatting after the         design
stage)

.       One should be able to design a single label and have the
template
replicate to all labels on a page.  For example,        a sheet of 1" x
4"
retail shelf tags.

other features???


Thanks!!
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