Minisoft fills out the 3000 form business Looking to spark a pile of its print management customers whose form options have run dry, Minisoft has acquired the marketing rights to FlexForm, an electronic forms package which operates on the 3000, as well as HP 9000, IBM RS/6000, and Windows NT platforms. Minisoft officials said that they believe Formation from Unison Software is in the same limbo as other products not directly related to Maestro since Unison sold out to Tivoli/IBM, while customers of Fantasia product are waiting on an update since JetForm purchased the product. “With the demise of Formation and Fantasia from the HP market, there has been a real lack of solutions for electronically generated forms,” said Minisoft founder Doug Greenup. “ The other nice thing is that FlexForm has been designed to work with our network printing product NetPrint. We will aggressively pursue our NetPrint installed base (2,000 strong) and attempt to ‘upgrade’ Formation and Fantasia users.” He’s promising tight integration with NetPrint, a product whose customer base doesn’t print forms through their HP 3000s. Minisoft will begin marketing FlexForm, which already has about 100 sites running the software on HP 3000s, on May 18. That’s also the new date promised for the read-and-write version of the ODBC/32 middleware for HP 3000s. Customers will be sent the new version automatically; Greenup said his firm has sold more than 1,000 copies of the product without write capability. That’s not surprising when you talk to MIS managers who use ODBC access from any vendor. Most of them report they don’t give users the capability to write to IMAGE, even if their chosen solution permits writing to the database. Although it’s something the majority of database administrators don’t enable, Minisoft’s latest version will allow updating of the IMAGE databases, KSAM and MPE files. A version of the product with its new capabilities is supposed to be online at www.minisoft.com on May 18. ODBC/32 was initially offered at $995, but that offer ended a few months ago. It’s priced in three groups based on CPU size. Fees for the host with unlimited use of the client are $1,995, $2,995 and $3,995. Customers who already own one of more other Minisoft products are entitled to a 10 percent discount off the price. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved