#multivalue

Come join us for the FREE Pick Users Group of Florida meeting, Wednesday, March 4, 2015 in Miami, Florida. Register today!

PICK/MultiValue is turning 50! A lot has happened in the last fifty years in the PICK/MultiValue market. We have gone full circle - from timeshare to cloud. Mark Pick will talk about all that has happened in the past 50 years and take a glimpse at the next 50. #PICKis50 

The recording of this webinar is now available here.

Do you know all the great features OpenQM has to offer? Did you know you can get all these great features, an AccuTerm license, and a fully managed hosted environment for as little as $15 per seat per month?

In this webinar, Martin Phillips, Technical Director of Ladybridge Systems, Ltd. will give an introduction to OpenQM and its latest features and benefits. In addition to this, we will explore the benefits of DBaaS and how it can enable software developers and small businesses take advantage of a new pricing model and capitalize on the advantages of cloud computing to power their business applications.

Some of the features that will be talked about include object oriented programming, exception handing and data collections. The availability of these features also eases the transition for developers coming to MultiValue with a background in programming languages such as C# or Java that are built around these concepts.

Join us to see these OpenQM features firsthand:

     DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service)

     Exception handling

     Object Oriented Programming

     Data Collections

     And more!

Key Takeaways:

Gain a true understanding of OpenQM and its many great features and capabilities.

Learn why DBaaS and SaaS are MultiValue's way forward and how OpenQM can help.

Why you should decide to use OpenQM as your database of choice.

Below you can find the Q&A from the March 12, 2014 Ten Things You Didn't Know About AccuTerm 7 webinar. If you have any questions not seen here, please feel free to contact us. As part of the webinar, now through March 31, 2014, Pick Cloud, Inc. in conjunction with AccuSoft Enterprises is offering an exclusive 25% discount on AccuTerm 7 products. To take advantage of this offer go here.

Q. Can I use AccuTerm to connect to my server in the Pick Cloud?

A. Absolutely. It is recommended that you use secure shell, or SSL telnet when connecting over the Internet.

Q. When displaying images on the screen, what are the best ways to handle resizing issues with image placement? A. The escape sequence for displaying images on the text screen has optional size arguments for scaling the image to fit the screen. The size is specified in screen columns & rows, and the image will be scaled to fit the specified size. An argument is also available to specify whether the original image aspect ratio should be preserved. See the online help “AccuTerm programming” topic for more details. Q. When launching a GUI application, how can I configure the GUI server's gray box from appearing in the center of my screen? 

A. The gray box is there to inform the user that the session is busy serving the GUI process and cannot be suppressed. You can use a simple script to minimize or hide the main AccuTerm window while the GUI is running.   Q. Are mouse clicks into or out of fields recognized? Are there processes that can be executed when a field is entered into (not just when leaving the field)? Can you highlight and copy labels and values in boxes? Some clients like to do this 'screen scraping' into emails. Can display only fields be 'greyed out'? A. Yes. Mostly. There Activate, Deactivate and Validate events that fire as the active control changes – either due to mouse clicks or Tab or Enter key. You can enable or disable (grey out) pretty much anything. You can highlight text in edit fields as long as they are not disabled. You can cut, copy and paste text in edit fields (unless you create your own custom popup menu that has these functions disabled or missing). Q. How do you eliminate page breaks when converting a report to.txt so we can show it in Excel.

A. This depends on the database. For D3, you can set the page length to zero using the TERM command. For QM, you need to set the page length to the max of 32767 using the TERM command. For other MV flavors you need to check the documentation, but it’s probably similar. 

Q. Is there a way to speed up FTServer? A. If this is specific to AIX, please search the forum for postings on AIX for tweaks that might help. If this is regarding using FTSERVER as a server from an Excel macro (or similar), one thing that might help is to reduce the number of calls to the server process. Perhaps calling a subroutine that returns several pieces of data instead of making one call for each datum.

Q. Are all the demos from the webinar available for download? A. Most of them. Some are installed as sample programs when you install the host programs. Some (AT.SEND.MAIL.xxxx) can be downloaded from the “technical articles” on the support page of the web site. 

Q.  Are there any known performance issues (i.e. slowdown) when doing GUI applications?

A. There are some “best practices” that help keep GUI apps responsive. There are quite a few threads on the forums about this. When beginning to learn GUI, it’s best not to think about this too much and concentrate on getting a functional app. But, it’s worth a scan of the GUI topics on the forum so you know what to expect.

Q.  Does AccuTerm run on AIX?

A.  AccuTerm runs fine on AIX (d3, jbase, U2, etc. running on AIX). Certain functions are slower on AIX due to bugs in the telnet server on AIX. There are some tweaks that might help (search the forum for ‘AIX’).

Q. In GUI mode, if you have a program that does a SORT or any TCL type display statement to the screen, does it do anything to make it display 'better' (i.e. display in text type box, html display, or anything).

A. No. But you could use EXECUTE … CAPTURING … to capture the output, and display it in a list box or multi-line text box in a GUI form.

Q. Are there updates to AT7 that we should be utilizing?

A. The current release is 7.1b-sp1 which was released in February 2014. There is a link on the About box to check for updates.

Q. Can we run multiple session/connections in separate windows, rather than tabbed MDI documents?

A. The File menu in AccuTerm always opens a new tab in the same window, but if you un-check the “use single instance of AccuTerm” setting in the General page of the settings, launching AccuTerm from the desktop or start menu will open separate windows.

Q. Is there support for running as GUI & character-based from the same program? I thought I'd seen that promoted as a feature.

A. You can suspend the GUI and run in character mode any time you want. Then resume the GUI to switch back where you left off. You cannot run both simultaneously, since the Pick process is single threaded (only runs one program at a time). 

Q. Is AccuTerm not compatible with OpenOffice, even though OpenOffice reads/writes Excel files (xls & xlsx)?

1. You are unsure what the cloud is. As a consumer, believe it or not you’ve been using the cloud for a long time. Some of the cloud technologies that the majority of people have used at some stage include Dropbox, Office 365, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you have any experience with using these systems and their storage services, then you will know that they are easy to use and often increase productivity and help to reduce costs.

2. The cloud is more expensive than on-premise management.  Many decision makers believe that an internally managed IT infrastructure is less expensive to deploy and operate than equivalent services in the cloud.  While in some cases that is accurate, most often it is not, particularly for smaller organizations.  In addition, cloud providers offer more predictable costs than on-premise deployments because the cost per seat is fixed over the lifetime of the contract with the cloud provider.  CapEx vs. OpEx: Most people miss the point about Cloud economics.  The typical cost discussion regarding internal data center versus cloud provider costs is over-simplified and fails to assign a true cost structure to the internal data center side. This isn't really surprising: Most IT organizations really don't have a clear understanding of their true costs in the first place.

3. The cloud is not secure. Cloud providers generally can afford better security in the form of two-factor authentication for access to every part of the data of a data center that houses customer data, multiple video cameras manned by 24x7 physical security teams, more robust anti-malware and hacking defenses, and the like.  Because leading cloud providers are supporting many tens of thousands of customers in a typical data center, their security budgets are generally greater that what most companies could afford to spend to protect just their own data and other resources.

In Pick Cloud's instance, in addition to all the data center security, all ports are locked down by default until we and the customer decide which ones need to be opened. We can even lock it down further to only allow certain IP addresses if that is what the client decides. 

4. Printing from my PICK spooler via the cloud is untenable.  Security is a big issue with printing from the cloud via the Internet. You want to protect remotely printed jobs from being seen by prying eyes, and also protect your web-connected printer from being accessed by unauthorized users—or even hackers. We encourage our clients to use a third-party tool like CirrusPrint which uses secure document transmission (SSL).

5. Productivity is reduced in the cloud. No, business owners are able to take advantage of advanced applications and servers, with support from experts who will maintain their data through the latest security and hardware. Data becomes accessible remotely and provides greater access capabilities, thus working to actually improve productivity.

6. Performance in the cloud is a problem. In most cases, performance is higher in the cloud because there is more available capacity and scalability. In other cases (most notably running a database server), performance may be less than a traditional server. As a best practice, it is always best to benchmark your application in and out of the cloud to determine if there is any performance impact - good or bad. 

7. The cloud is 100% all the time. Once you get in the cloud, there will be no worries and everything will run smoothly and there will be no downtime. As everyone knows, technology can not be relied on entirely. Always keep in mind you need to ensure that you have a service-level agreement in place to cover the occurrence of any downtime. And, also, remember to structure the SLA to a level that makes most sense for your business. So, if a supplier guarantees 99 percent uptime be aware that this could mean your system or application process is unavailable for several hours a month.

8. I can build my own cloud. Yes, you could spend a lot of time effort and resources into building your cloud but is that the focus of your business? Most likely not. For the same reasons businesses don't build their own power plants or cell towers, trusting a cloud experienced provider to deliver IT services gives you the freedom to focus on your business not just keeping your servers humming.

9. Cloud computing is just a fad.  Cloud computing is here to stay. Even though cloud as a term is fairly new, the concepts and technologies have been evolving for many years. The cloud continues to emerge as a game changing technology with continued high adoption rates and investment. Gartner Research predicts that by 2015, 80% of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some form of cloud computing services. 

10. The cloud is too complex. There are different types of systems out there and they have differing levels of complexity. There are models that simplify management and require little change of how you do things, while others offer more control and will lead to further change in application architecture.