GT Software Announces BMS/TS – The Most Powerful Screen Generator for CICS® and Transaction Server Now Enabling IBM’s 3270 Bridge!

ATLANTA, Georgia – June 03, 2003 – Atlanta based GT Software, a leading provider of data access and process solutions, today announced the immediate availability of BMS/TS™ 8.0. In 1982, GT Software designed the first version of BMS/GT. Today, BMS/TS, formerly BMS/GT, produces, edits, and maintains 3270 "green screens" for mainframe based applications while meeting today's end-users’ expectations for improved user interfaces and increased productivity. This enhanced maintenance and development tool produces the basic fields and code required for upgrading individual screens and includes a number of valuable capabilities and features.

Brett Roeder, Director of Product Management at GT Software stated, “Today, most organizations are trying to figure out how to use their existing CICS transactions with IBM's 3270 Bridge. With BMS/TS 8.0, developers can quickly regenerate BMS maps and properly enable them for use with the bridge and corresponding HTML or XML templates.”

BMS/TS now includes the following features and benefits:

• 3270 Bridge Enablement:
  Generate HTML pages directly to CICS or Transaction Server BMS maps. Now, when publishing legacy to the Web or other applications, BMS/TS provides a seamless transformation of existing BMS screens to HTML. This allows users to directly access legacy system BMS screens via Web browsers and makes them available for cross platforms/cross applications communications.
• Application Data Structures (ADS) Generation:
  BMS/TS can now generate valid ADS for screens that have been defined with line occurs, field occurs, column occurs, and user occurs definitions.
• Template Generation:
  
  • Type 1 (Customizable) – Type 1 templates generate an HTML page that has all the fields visible in the HTML. You can open the HTML page in any Web development tool, view all the controls and components on the page, and edit each control and component. It is extremely easy to customize the screens to any preference.
  • Type 2 (CICS Managed) – These templates are not customizable by the user, rather their “look and feel” is dictated by CICS.
• Double - Byte Character Control:
  BMS/TS now supports SOSI (Shift Out, Shift In) and international character sets.
• Enhanced Import Facility:
  Provides an automatic import facility to “pull in” maps built with other screen generator tools, such as IBM’s SDF and SDFII.

With the increasing need to provide HTML output from Legacy CICS applications, the IBM 3270 Bridge has been the common method for providing such capabilities to 3270 based applications. With the new 3270 Bridge support in BMS/TS, interacting with the 3270 Bridge requires no coding or additional utilities. BMS/TS provides automatic generation of the physical map, the ADS, and an HTML template from your new and existing BMS maps for use by the 3270 Bridge, enabling seamless HTML output.