Choosing Standard vs. Enterprise edition - Gotchas?

[Brian <iserieslists@xxxxxxxxx>]

The additional cost ($70K - 100K) of going to an i5 enterprise edition
has us seriously looking at choosing an i5 standard edition. Lawson's
ERP suite is the primary application being hosted on the iSeries with
a small amount (200 DSPFs) of homegrown 5250 programs that are mostly
parameter entry front-ends to batch jobs. There are a few other
third-party utility applications like the EZView file editor, and
EasyMenu in the mix but thats it. The 60 CPW of interactive offered by
an express edition would be sufficient for the 5250 workload but the
batch/non-5250 requirements are in the 2400-3300 CPW range so that
eliminates the express edition.

The users currently access the Lawson applications through Lawson's
LID interface which is a GUI that does not use the 5250 data stream.
Additionally, with the upgrade to Lawson 8.0 the user interface will
be through Lawson's portal. The 5250 programs can be dealt with either
by Webfacing or CGIDEV2. That only leaves a couple of "green screen"
utilities to deal with.

My first question is have you moved from an enterprise to a standard
edition and did you find any unexpected problems that had to be
addressed? Secondly, do you know of any non-5250 replacements for a
file editor like EZView and a menu system like EasyMenu? Finally, Is
there a redbook or other source that gives guidance for moving to a
totally non-5250 environment?

Kind regards,

Brian