Mshen   23535 pts.  |   May 6 2009  5:10AM GMT

Help Systems has a software package called Robot/ALERT which will send SMS messages to your phone and allow you to reply to the message from your phone. You need to set this up with Robot/CONSOLE which will monitor the message queues.

Ug400guru   40 pts.  |   May 6 2009  8:17PM GMT

Robot Alert will cost you an arm and a leg. As previously mentioned you will need Console as well. I ditched both of those products and use MPLUS that funny enough, Help Systems just acquired. Up until this point, MPLUS was about 10k for software license and 2k.year in maintenance. Robot was about 35k to start and 10k per year. Both work about the same, with the exception of OPAL cose that H/S uses that can tie in with their scheduler. It depends on the robustness you need. If you need all the bells and whistles, get Alert/Console. If you need basic “git er dun” get MPLUS.

Gilly400   23625 pts.  |   May 7 2009  10:23AM GMT

Hi,

That ALL sounds expensive to me. I think BlueNote was way cheaper.

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.

WoodEngineer   2280 pts.  |   May 7 2009  4:49PM GMT

I would love to talk to a Blue Note user.
Anyone out there?

Gilly400   23625 pts.  |   May 8 2009  10:19AM GMT

Hi,

I have used it in the past (previous job). The newer version seems to have much more functionality than the old version I used, but what would you like to know?

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.

WoodEngineer   2280 pts.  |   May 8 2009  3:40PM GMT

Thanks for your reply, Gilbert.
Where did you buy Blue Note? I contacted the company listed in Blue Note’s web site but they said they no longer are a distributor.
Also wondering if you had to do much programming to get your iSeries to handle responses to QSYSOPR messages sent via Blue Note.

Gilly400   23625 pts.  |   May 12 2009  10:19AM GMT

Hi,

Afraid I don’t know where we got BlueNote originally. Have you tried contacting Agent Data directly? They’re Danish so they probably speak good english.

We didn’t have the ability to answer messages in our (older) version of BlueNote, but I suspect that there’s no programming necessary for it. We used it to monitor our Night batch processing, sending progress messages so we could keep an eye on how far the jobs were. The only thing we had to do to get this working was to add commands to send the messages (I believe it was just SNDSMSMSG). If there were system messages these were automatically picked up and forwarded via SMS/Text messages (depending on filter parameters that you can set up).

I found it a really handy tool for monitoring and really easy to set up. Before we had this we used to get to the office to find that the batch had stopped on something insignificant and still had several hours processing to go before any users could access the system - not a nice place to be…phones glowing red, management breathing down your neck, etc.

The other products such as Robot probably have more functionality, but they also seem to be much more expensive. I guess if budget’s not an issue then these products are worth a look.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.

Gilly400   23625 pts.  |   May 12 2009  10:22AM GMT

Hi,

Just found this link. Looking at the list - I think we got our copy from SpaceTec.

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.

WoodEngineer   2280 pts.  |   May 12 2009  6:18PM GMT

Thank you for the reference, Martin.
I’ll check it out.