 Statement
Formatting at The Mutual Group
"A Year in Review"
By Don Maxwell, The Mutual Group
About Mutual
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AFP shop since 1986 |
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60 million impressions/year |
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3 Xerox IPS 4635, 2 IPS 4890 Hilite Colour
printers |
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100 IBM AFP distributed printers |
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All are driven from PSF/MVS |
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We do this by choice |
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Management costs of multiple small servers
are too high |
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First Mutual insurance company in Canada |
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First in Canada to announce "DeMutualization" |
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Product Line |
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Retail life insurance |
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Group and individual savings and retirement |
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Employee benefits |
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The Way It Was (1987 - 1997)
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PPFA/OGL |
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Quite restrictive |
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No word wrap, numeric formatting,
tables, center/right/full alignment
with proportional fonts |
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Very poor conditional processing |
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Application tied to output appearance |
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Expensive to develop/maintain |
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Only the simplest apps (form+data)
fit in this class |
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but it was really fast and cheap! |
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High End Applications - DCF: had its drawbacks |
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Slow development cycle (code/format/print) |
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Required "tag" (specialized)
input file |
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No ampersands/semicolons in data,
all numbers are preformatted, all
totals are precalculated by application |
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Performance issues |
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Lack of function |
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No dynamic charting, no numeric
formatting, single output file, poor
string manipulation |
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Not WYSIWYG development |
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