Minisoft has rolled out a 7.0 version of its eFORMz paperless reporting utility for the 3000 community. The new version recognizes the Rich Text Format (RTF) used by Microsoft Word and understood by other word processing applications. Minisoft says the new support means

EFORMz is Java-based, so Minisoft recommends that 3000 sites host the software on a non-3000 platform to avoid the Java on MPE/iX performance issues. But it works with applications common to the HP 3000 community such as MANMAN, Ecometry/Escalate — really just about anything that generates data for a report from 3000s. Users design forms in a favorite word processor (Microsoft Word, WordPerfect), desktop publisher (PageMaker, QuarkXPress), or drawing package. Once the form is designed, eFORMz captures the output and adds the electronic form to its library.

The eDirect module, which can help sites go paperless, is included in eFORMz 7.0. Using eDirect enables eFORMz to send any document via e-mail in PDF format. The new eFORMz also supports the next generation 2D stacked barcodes, which allow more information in a smaller space; data is encoded in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. The money-saving new US Postal Service barcodes are also supported.