Re: Looking for like-minded programmers who use the enhanced

My personal experience is that most GUI based data entry screens are poorly designed. It is tough to beat a plain text screen for data entry. Yes, GUI looks pretty and may be good for reviewing reports and inquiry. Instead of an all or nothing between text based and GUI based, I think we need a balance of text based for head down hard core >> data entry and GUI for inquiry and reporting.

I don't see how anyone can argue that a Web based data entry screen is more efficient than a 5250 session. Our Customer Service department still complains that a web interface for Sales Order entry has too many screens and requires too many uses of the mouse.

What is lost on this picture, however, is that we are arguing about the one clear winner for the 5250 side, the data entry battle. In the meantime, there is a complete war going on and on virtually every other front, 5250 is a loser.

E1 provides through the web interface:
- The ability to dynamically filter the rows of data shown by putting in search criteria over fields,
- The ability to save these queries and enable dynamic changes of the records shown (open orders/open past due orders/open past due orders for a specific branch/etc) with the click of a mouse,
- The ability to hid fields in rows like Excel does,
- The ability to export directly to Excel,
- The ability to display multi-level Bill of Materials in a flow chart with pictures to show all the components/parents,
- The ability to display work orders in a calendar format, and allow users to drag and drop work orders to manage capacity,
- On data entry screens, the ability to hide fields or alter the order of fields on a per user basis,
- The ability on all screens to change the descriptions of all fields, again, on a per user basis,
- The ability to upload data from an Excel spreadsheet and have the system validate all entries as though they were keyed.

And the list goes on and on. Could all of these features be done in a 5250 screen? Certainly. Booth and others have done many of them. Can they all be done in every interactive program in the entire ERP package? Not likely.

Picking heads down data entry as a clear 5250 winner is, well, fine. In the meantime, the battlefield has moved past us. Nobody cares, certainly not the people in management.