Re: Hard Copy reports

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 h
and,
> for "tracking and auditor and regulation" purposes, it seems to me that th
e 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 produce
d 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.>[/col
or]

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 a
noterh
> place where "batch COBOL-type" processing works well - IMHO.  Again, altho
ugh
> 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 st
ill
> provide a hard-copy (or looks like hard-copy) version of monthly
> bills/statements. We (CLC) have discussed such things before, however, I k
now of
> few "large companies" that have converted their "traditional procedural"
> applications for such bill/statement processing to OO - even if they DO pr
ovide
> "real time" versions of the information via OO applications.
>
> Are you (Pete or anyone else) aware of any large companies that still prod
uce
> 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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