Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania has been running a LaserVault Reports
system for its AS/400 host system since December 1995. We talked with Mike
Linardi, IS Director of Westmoreland County about LaserVault Reports for
non-native iSeries report archiving and retrieval. Here is what he had to tell
us:
Integration with the AS/400
“There isn’t a problem with LaserVault integrating with the AS/400,“ says
Mike. “We’re running the LaserVault Universal Server on a Windows 2000 system,
and using green screen 5250 emulation with our end users.”
What they archive
“Because we are also the Westmoreland county courthouse and have all the
county row offices here, we archive everything from election reports to payroll
reports to dog licenses. This includes tax reports and forms, pension reports,
and death reports go in. We also archive our daily job history of what’s
performed on our AS/400.”
Uploading reports
“It doesn’t take long at all to upload reports to LaserVault from our
AS/400,” Mike says. “I can upload reports to LaserVault as the reports are made
available to me, since the end users can still access the system while I am
adding new reports. Our end users are able to access anything that has been
archived out, and as soon as we finish archiving a report it is available to our
end users.”
Archive reports on the fly
“With our older server, we would do all our uploading of reports in the
evening, using automated jobs,” Mike tells us. “Back then you couldn’t upload
reports while end users were on the system. Now, you can upload reports without
affecting end users. Being able to archive reports on the fly is a real
convenience, since end users can still access the archive while I am uploading
new reports.”
Lookup from the 5250 emulators
“End users access the reports through the 5250,” explains Mike. “We have them
add the LaserVault LVUS Live to their library list and then they can use the
LaserVault Universal Client. I then authorize the end user a user name and
password, and at that point they can then access the reports.
“The end users are happy because they can get to their reports through a 5250
and it doesn’t take a whole lot of training to do it. A lot of our end users are
not primarily computer-oriented, so we just give them a short script on how to
get to the information, and that is basically how we implement LaserVault to
them.”
End users and security
“We have about 1200 end users,” says Mike, “but not all of them access
LaserVault Reports, because it is only supplied to certain departments. So, what
I’ve done is create authorizations that define what reports a group of users can
get into, and assigned these authorizations to the individual end users. From
that point on their user name and password only authorizes them to view the
reports that I have assigned them access to.”
Tech support
“I’ve never had a problem with tech support. Rick came out and set us up
three or four years ago, we supplied the hardware, and he installed the software
and set pretty much everything up for us. We’ve been running great ever since.”