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| William M. Klein wrote:
> It seems to me that for "day-to-day" buiseness needs - having "real
time access
> to information" is the critical requirement of much of IT. On the other hand,
> for "tracking and auditor and regulation" purposes, it seems to me that the need
> for (remarkly frequently changing) hard-copy reports is growing, not
> diminishing.
Not necessarily. In fact, reliable electronic records are growing more
important. We have an entire "Electronic Records Management" (ERM)
system, with various levels of training required based on what level of
responsibility you have.
My previous message praising XML is also rooted in experience. DoD has
mandated that all data interchange between system be in XML. It's
bulkier, but we've got the bandwidth. With an XSD schema applied, it
can actually validate the data before it's sent to the receiving system.
> As a COBOL report writer fan, these types of reports can EASILY be produced and
> modified in COBOL. As a "Workstaion-attached PDF and 'graphic' report fan, I
> would think that COBOL is not a good (much less the best) tool for the job.>
Report Writer can even be used to generate XML, although it's output is
not the most efficient. Ideally, in an OO environment, you would have
an XML document object, and let it deal with generating the actual XML.
A guy I heard last w said "XML is sort of like lye; it's very
useful in small quantities, but you should never touch it with your bare
hands." :)
> P.S. "Monthly" hard-copy (or soft - but looks like hard copy) bills are anoterh
> place where "batch COBOL-type" processing works well - IMHO. Again, although
> many/most "customers" like real-time online access to the current state of their
> accounts/bills, at least in the US, I still see that most such buisness still
> provide a hard-copy (or looks like hard-copy) version of monthly
> bills/statements. We (CLC) have discussed such things before, however, I know of
> few "large companies" that have converted their "traditional procedural"
> applications for such bill/statement processing to OO - even if they DO provide
> "real time" versions of the information via OO applications.
>
> Are you (Pete or anyone else) aware of any large companies that still produce
> monthly (or quarterly or year-end) bills/statementes that have converted such
> procesisng to any OO solution? I would think there must be SOME somewhere, but
> I certainly haven't heard of this being common.
I'm not sure - I know that the only hard-copy bill I get now is from
Comcast. :) I think that approved electronic records are gaining in
popularity. What they're generated with, though, I'm not sure. I know
that the biggest request we have is for Excel files; we've found that if
we send an HTTP header with the content type as excel (not quite sure of
the exact value), then output an HTML table. Once it's in Excel, they
can slice and dice and do their analysis; I doubt anyone is printing
them out.
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