Onstream has "IBM coup" in Britain.

Two leading New Zealand programmers, Brent Foster and Stephen Quinn, have successfully ported the revolutionary imaging and knowledge management programme, Trapeze™, to the IBM OS/390 mainframe used by a major government agency in the UK.

The success of the two programmers, seconded to the UK agency from the Palmerston North staff of Onstream Systems, has been hailed as "a major coup" by David Kelly, CEO of the company which created the Trapeze suite.

Noting the success could lead to increased demand for the Onstream products in the IBM mainframe and other Unix-based environments, Mr Kelly said, "The client is very satisfied. They've got a mainframe product under PC licensing and at the same time they've saved lots of money".

The programmers completed the task, including integration to IBM's web sphere, in three weeks. The British IBM OS/390 mainframe, on which the New Zealand-developed software and a customised version of Trapeze™ Desktop viewer has been installed, is among the biggest manufactured by IBM. The system is designed to handle tens of thousands of concurrent users.

The British agency adopted the Trapeze™ solution including the Trapeze™ Desktop viewer to allow its staff and clients to handle electronic information "as easily as if they were handling traditional folders and paper" "Trapeze™ makes it easy to handle big files such as: land information titles and dees over the web using web-based technology with extra-low bandwidth requirements," Mr Kelly said.

"Being both an intuitive and user-friendly solution, Trapeze™ does not require any additional training for end users to get quick access to electronically stored information. Using a "read only" facility end users can find, view and print any documents they require easily and quickly.

Brent Foster, Onstream Systems’ lead programmer, said; "It all went smoothly and the customer was very pleased".

The British agency has its own version of Trapeze™ called the Filed Plan Viewer. The configuration automatically changes into Trapeze™ Viewer when a multi-page file is opened, using Trapeze™ Webstreamer.

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