Progress/Symix and Macintosh

[RiccardoGallini]

We are considering to purchase Symix's SyteLine as the new ERP system in our italian firm. We like it very much and consider that it suits very well to our need.
Also our existing manufacturing software is based on an old version of Progress (6.x) running on some Unix flavour, which we access through a standard terminal emulation (telnet)

BUT:
here, we have a large Macintosh installed base and we have been told that there is no Macintosh 'run-time' for Progress and, therefore, no way to run directly Symix clients on our Macs.
The solution suggested is Windows terminal server with Citrix Metaframe...but that means 35 Windows NT sessions on one or more servers, we don't like this very much.

Is there really no chance to run Progress client on a Mac?? And the famous Java? Does Progress have this feature? I cannot believe!!

Thank you very much for any info you will provide us, we are very interested about this topic!!

Riccardo Gallini
Mino S.p.A.
Alessandria - Italy

 

[Chris Kelleher]

Glad to hear you are considering Syteline. I agree it's a great package. In fact I started working with it back when it was called Syman from MMS International.

While there is no Progress executable for the Mac, you could run Windows emulation software on your Macs (if they are newer, faster machines). I think I have heard of other people doing just this.

Also, running on Windows NT Terminal Server is also a good plan. I think I understand your concern of how it will perform, but having the server and client running on the same machine will really cut down on your network traffic. This can often be a bottleneck in a Client/Server system.

If you have any specific concerns, please reply. I have run other Progress packages with Citrix with good success.

HTH.

Chris Schreiber
chris@progresstalk.com

 

[RiccardoGallini]

Dear ProgressTalk,
this is Riccardo Gallini speaking again, from Italy.

Looking around other not-very-big-and-expensive ERP systems, we've found that most of the ones we liked lacked on Macintosh support, so we are quite ready to take the route to emulation and/or terminal server.

I would like to know more about the deploying of such applications (like the one running in Progress) through Citrix.

1) Do we need Metaframe or Winframe?
2) Running multiple NT clients on a single terminal server is like running many separate NT systems, from the performance point of view or or can they "share" some system resources in order to obtain some "economies of scale"? I don't know if this question is clear...sorry!
3) Do we really need to have multiple independent NT clients on the server machine or can each user see one of many published applications running in the same server environment? I ask this because most of the users connecting through terminal server will probably use the ERP only and no other program (e.g. Office or Web Browsers ecc...)

I hope everything has been clearly explained by me. I'm not sure, but this "server based" computing concept is quite new to us and we have still some doubts wether it is applicable economically to medium-small sized firms like ours.

Thank you very much,

Riccardo Gallini
MINO S.p.A.
Alessandria - Italy