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 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 week 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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