Software Menue

MENUE© - an user environment for VMS & OpenVMS

MENUE© is a tool by which the VMS system manager (or even a normal user) may ease the user's access to programs and commands. By using this, the computer environment looks homogenous to the user. Knowledge about the operating system is not essential and confrontation with the dollar prompt is avoided. And that is true even for the MENUE©-manager as MENUE© is amazingly easy to maintain! Neither programming nor editor skills are required.
You may embed programs as well as DCL command files or DCL commands into MENUE©. In principle every program may be integrated into MENUE© without any changes. MENUE© is even able to ask a parameter for the function to call from the user.

MENUE© consists of two parts: the user environment and the according maintenance program (which is also integrated in the user environment). The maintenance program creates, modifies and deletes menus very quickly. This is an interactive program which is, like the whole MENUE© package, very easy to use and to maintain. Almost all tasks can be done while MENUE© is running.
The user environment presents the previously created menus. In addition there is a file and directory manager, a queue manager and a mail manager shipped along with MENUE©. The programs allow manipulation of files (e.g. Copy, Delete, Edit, Print, Purge, Rename, Type), directories (e.g. Change, Create, Down, Up), print & batch jobs (e.g. Delete, Stop, Requeue) and mail messages (e.g. Send, Reply, Signature,...).

MENUE© may be run in two modes: either captive; the user has no permission to use the normal DCL level, or non-captive; the user may switch between the normal dollar prompt and MENUE©. Beside this, MENUE© may be called with a timeout qualifier. If the time a user is inactive superseeds the timeout value specified, the user is logged out.
It is possible to integrate more than one menu system in MENUE©. The different menu systems can be connected to each other. This feature enhances flexibility and allows the programmer to integrate his own programs into a consistent user environment. In addition you may specify different user specific environments.
MENUE© offers the possibility to protect or hide options. Due to this, only authorized or informed users are able to select these options.
The user may call an option by selection out of a menu or by a short name. Short names increase access to options dramatically, because they can be called from any menu. At every stage, online help is available.

Last but not least: If it happens that a program aborts with an error status, the user will return to the menu from which the aborted program was started.
MENUE© needs less than 4.0 MByte disk space. The program itself only needs 70 KByte. There is no process creation upon calling a program within MENUE©. This allows high performance and low system resource consumption.
Installation will be performed by VMS-Install, quickly and easily and without the need for rebooting the machine. The whole installation process can be done within less than 15 minutes.
MENUE© is available in an English and a German version and can easily be adapted to almost any other language.