Modular development makes it easier for you to build and maintain your applications

Today's development style is changing to meet the new capabilities of technology, and is changing for the better. By creating your applications as interactive "blocks," you can do more with less code. Each building block's behavior is based on how it is called meaning one program module (building block) might do the work of three or four different conventional programs.

At mrc, we use SmartLinks to make it easier for you to use and re-use these "building block" applications to create larger and more complex systems.

First, here's a definition of SmartLinks.

To see it in action, here's a quick and fun little interactive presentation on mrc's "building blocks" to give you a visual concept of how it works.

Great business article--and not just for our Oracle users

This article in Oracle Magazine gives you three surefire ways to increase revenue and lower costs today that anyone can use, perhaps even you.

Manufacturer's case study shows how Web application system can be built in less than 2 weeks

Introducing this quick case study from UK-based Stannah Group, the largest stairlift manufacturer in the world. They were able to create an entire system of Web applications for their customers in just two weeks.

You can read it right here.

Additionally, this new quick-read case study style is one we will be using for all of our case studies, to allow you to skim the case studies quickly.

If you like the new style, prefer the old one, or have suggestions to how we could improve the way you receive information, let us know.

Omni User Group Conference

Interested in the iSeries platform? Will you be in Chicago on February 7th?

If so, come to the Drury Lane theater in Oak Brook, IL to hear the following popular speakers including: George Farr, Kent Milligan, Jim Oberholtzer, Larry Bolhuis, Joe Pluta, John Paris/Sue Gantner and many others on the state of the iSeries going into 2006.

Session topics will include the latest information on Virtualization, iSeries Access, RPG ILE, Websphere, Java, SQL and much more.

If you are interested in learning more, visit the: omni user group conference site here.

Last chance to sign up to win your Innovation Awards: Sign up today!

IBM has teamed up with COMMON, the world’s largest group of IT professionals who use midrange IBM and IBM-compatible information technology, to offer IBM eServer iSeries Innovation Awards.

The nominations for the 2006 IBM eServer iSeries Innovation Awards are open through end of day next Tuesday, January 31, 2006. This means that you have less than one week to nominate your favorite customer, your own firm, or yourself for this award that recognizes business and IT innovation at the highest level.

Here are the five nomination categories for the 2006 IBM eServer iSeries Innovation Awards:

Application Deployment Award

Business Resiliency Award

Infrastructure Simplification Award

i5/OS Focus Award

Education Excellence Award

For further descriptions and additional details on these award categories, go to

Innovation Awards.

The award recipients and their teams will be honored at the IBM eServer iSeries Innovation Awards banquet, to be held at the Spring 2006 COMMON Conference and Expo in Minneapolis on Monday, March 27, 2006.

Award recipients will receive: a crystal award, complimentary
2006 COMMON membership, five complimentary registrations to a 2006 COMMON conference, one complimentary registration to the 2006 COMMON IT Executive conference, feature articles in COMMON.Connect Magazine and IBM eServer iSeries Edition Magazine, and other press features.

50% confess their enterprises make poor decisions...

...because users can't get enough good information.

This 2006 reader poll from Intelligent Enterprise magazine turned up a lot of interesting statistics, including the following:

• 47% of IE readers have killed enterprise application projects because they couldn't quantify potential productivity gains
  
• 65% are wary of deploying IT systems
  
• 62% fault vendors for lack of business data/application integration and version alignment

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Should organizations turn away from further BI investments? Hardly..."The challenges facing us include effective data integration, implementations that span multiple hardware and software platforms, use of multiple BI tools and differences in architectures," says Steven Dempsey, senior technical specialist at Washington Mutual and a survey respondent."

And here's an example of the kind of a BI application that you can build today that alleviates that problem by working with any packaged software and spanning multiple hardware and software platforms. NOTE these capabilities:

• You can roll your mouse over the pie graph to see revenue
• You can drill down through each of the product categories to see what products shipped in 2005, noting their revenue, profits and margins
• You can even click on the product image for the details on each item shipped.

Here's the full Intelligent Enterprise article.

MC Press: Focus on Application Development

Have you had a chance to read the MC Press article last week featuring mrc? It's about what you should look for when selecting an application development tool.

Check it out here:
Choosing a Development Tool for Web Applications

Introducing mrc Prompt

Here's a new m-Power capability that makes it faster and easier for your users to get to the critical information they need.

We call it mrc Prompt.

To see it in action: Go to this application and look for the “Customer Name” column.

You'll notice there's a field to enter information. The dropdown next to it is marked CT. (CT stands for Contains, so when you select CT from the drop down, you are looking for Customer Names that "contain" the letter, word or number you are searching for.)

To use it, let's say you are using this application to look for customers with the word “Bikes” contained in their names. To use mrc Prompt, type the word “Bikes” slowly, one letter at a time. As each letter is entered, a drop down will appear showing you only those options that contain the word bikes. You can then select from that screen and hit enter to bring up your record of choice.

Give it a try in each of these fields. It's an amazing way to drill down to filter information on the fly...and it's brand new!

Portal Push

Have you seen Information Week this week? Companies who are reluctant to spend money on moving from legacy systems to service-oriented architectures are now using portals as integration tools. Here's the article: http://www.informationweek.soa-pipeline.com/news/175801004

If you'd like a quick and easy way to do the same, m-Power and the mrc-Productivity Series both give you the ability to turn your business applications into working portlets.

Get rewarded for your enthusiasm!

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Are you happy with the solutions you've been building with m-Power or the mrc-Productivity Series? Well, don't hide your light under a basket!

Now, when you talk about your solution to iSeries News, you'll not only have a chance at seeing your name in print, but you'll also recieve a prize from iSeries and a free custom T-shirt from us.

To sign up, go to: http://www.iseriesnetwork.com/readerschoice/


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