City of Largo, FL Wins With Panther Again

The City of Largos’ Recreation Department received rave reviews from users when they went live in mid August 2010. The Recreation application, which was built with Panther5.20/Oracle/Linux, is an accounting, management and tracking system, allowing the department employees to manage their daily duties in an effective way.

For the past 12 years, the city has utilized Prolifics’ legacy tools to build applications for their Police and Recreation Department, starting with JAM7 on SCO. With the release of Panther 5.0 for Linux several years ago, the city migrated most of their applications off their SCO platform. A reason for staying with Panther was its portability; i.e. ability to run on most platforms and to connect to heterogeneous databases with minimal changes.

In recent months, the city’s development team has been thrilled at enhancements made to the Panther Linux product, which include support for anti-aliased fonts, image and text support for tab cards and enhancements to tooltips.

The city’s next project is to web-enable the Recreation app, allowing citizens to register for classes being offered by the department.

According to their Developer/Administrator, “... I cannot over emphasize the effect that the upgraded Panther features have had with both the Recreation Department and City as a whole. We've been able to provide tools with a modern look and feel and in many cases, better than what we could buy at comparative costs.”

Sample screen shots from the Recreation Application






To see the customer's take on this solution, read Dave Richards' entry about Panther on the City of Largo Work Blog

Amrith Kaur-Maldonado, first joined Prolifics as a Consultant and then moved into the Prolifics Education Dept as a JAM/Panther trainer. She has experience in conducting WebSphere Developer Training at IBM training facilities. Amrith then transitioned back into the Technical Support Team 7 years ago and she now managers the Support Team.

TAM ESSO in the wild: A look at ISO-NE's implementation

Christopher Ehrsam, Senior Security Consultant

I recently was involved in a unique implementation of IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign On (TAM ESSO), working with ISO-NE, a major utility company, towards increased security and monitoring performance. Operating in a 24/7 environment, ISO machines must be highly available and employees monitor the health of the power grids in control room using a number of shared workstations. The company is required to track which users log into each workstation and must lock machines that were not being worked on. Doing so complies with Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) government standards and enables system notifications for user activity on any workstation. The new system integrates the existing building badges and unique user IDs making two- factor authentication possible.

As we were planning this project, we knew how significant time would be with ISO. Summer is considered a “high risk season” in this industry because of the increased utility usage during these months and the company’s infrastructure must be prepared to handle the activity. We realized the importance of preparing the company’s infrastructure as quickly and efficiently as possible. Prolifics focused this implementation around ISO’s specific security and monitoring desires, which puts them at an advantage with the badge reader and centralized auditing capabilities.

For those of you who are interested in hearing more, I will be speaking at Prolifics’ TAM ESSO live Webinar on September 15 to discuss the solution’s implementation and success. The webinar will include a demonstration showing how TAM ESSO can increase enterprise security, provide application access tracking, and increase your ROI.

Christopher Ehrsam is a Senior Security Consultant with Prolifics. Chris has been in the Identity Management field for over 10 years, getting his experience working with the Tivoli product family at IBM.