Reports made accessible to hundreds within WebSphere®

Case Study 17

Problem:

A major insurance company has over 350 selling agents out in the field. Report data such as client status, insurance coverage and contracts are often needed by these agents who call the home office for overnight copies and faxes of the data. Their applications, running within IBM's WebSphere environment on the home office AS/400, are limited in the amount of information displayed. Screen printouts were not acceptable because their viewable reports have multiple levels. It is not unusual for a 2-3 page screen document to actually produce a 6-9 page printout. Putting AS/ 400 emulator licenses on each agent's PC as a solution would be very costly and very labor intensive to support. This insurance company wanted a way that all the report data for each specific agent was available at any time within a secure and controlled access.

Solution:

The client determined that he could conveniently provide accurate and complete reports while controlling access by setting up specific directories with authorizations for each agent at his web site. An agent could then access his data, authorized by his specific agent number, quickly and easily, at any time, and from any location. OctoPDF and RPM Select were installed on the client's Window's server to receive the report, convert and file back to the appropriate directory the report data from with in the AS/400's WebSphere environment. RPM Select was used to receive data from the AS/400 and pass it on to the OctoPDF software. OctoPDF would extract the agent number from within the file, convert the data, assign specific directory and file names. The resulting PDF document would be stored on a disk accessible by WebSphere and accessed by remote AS/400 users. Once installed, the software ran unattended and automatically filed each agents report data for access by agent number.

Typical Applications:

• Electronic disbursement of reports
• Unattended Directory/File Name Management
• Protected - Non Editable Storage
• Local printing option when required

Products Required: OctoPDF™ and RPM Remote Print Manager®