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Evaluating Reflection Desktop

When you start Reflection the first time, all of your existing macros, keyboard maps, and session files work as expected from prior versions of Extra! and Reflection, and in many cases, competitive emulators. Reflection has the features you depend on for advanced productivity, secure host connectivity, and much more.

Instead of an application designed for the operating systems you were using a decade ago, Reflection gives you an emulator that has earned the Windows logos pertinent to the enterprise and is uniquely integrated with the desktop and Microsoft Office applications.

Windows integration provides a range of built-in security capabilities, designed to help you meet evolving internal and external security requirements. Integration with Windows' User Account Control (UAC) maximizes your control over user access to administrative features and functions, and minimizes desktop vulnerabilities. And Reflection's Trusted Locations feature can prevent security breaches by allowing users to open documents only from trusted file locations that you specify.

Reflection protects the security of your data before, during, and after transmission by providing time-tested cryptographic modules that meet the rigorous federal government FIPS 140-2 standards. Besides providing secure access to hosts and gateways, additional tools help you verify the authenticity of hosts, gateways, and clients, and facilitate compliance with regulations such as Payment Card Industry (PCI) audits, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, FISMA, Basel II, and evolving regulatory mandates regarding data protection.

Open Text provides a single-vendor host access solution supported by dedicated security development, test, support, and services teams at Open Text.

Reflection seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office applications to provide a consistent user experience. And the productivity features that you used in Extra! are more powerful than ever. If you've been using PComm, or HostExplorer software or any other emulator, you will be amazed at how much these tools save time.

Using Reflection, you can:

  • Open an e-mail message or Word document, and automatically include the current host screen content in the message or document.

  • Send a single screen or a series of screens to a PowerPoint presentation to create training decks or manuals for host applications.

  • Configure information privacy filters to prevent online display of sensitive data, such as account and personal identification numbers.

  • Use the auto-complete and auto-expand functions to save time and keystrokes, and the built-in spell check function to reduce errors.

Instead of just emulating a dumb terminal, Reflection makes your emulation sessions powerful, productive, secure, and easy to use.

Open any number of sessions in the Reflection workspace, and connect to any combination of mainframe, AS/400 (IBM System i), UNIX/Linux, or OpenVMS hosts. Each session appears within its own tabbed window, making it fast and easy to move between sessions. Session documents include pointers to mouse maps, keyboard maps, theme files, hotspot files, and Ribbons that you can customize for greater efficiency.

You can even open Web applications in the workspace. You can, for example, copy an address out of your customer database, paste it into your favorite online mapping application, and get directions to the customer location. Or, create a custom application using the Reflection .NET API to automate this process. Once your sessions are configured to your liking, you can save them as a layout file, which opens them together with a single click.

You can quickly take advantage of the advanced capabilities of Reflection because Reflection supports your existing IT infrastructure, including Windows 10, Windows Remote Desktop Services, and Citrix and VMware virtualization platforms, as well as the cloud.

If you don't yet have Reflection software, go to www.microfocus.com/products/reflection/desktop and fill out an evaluation request form. You'll be sent an e- mail message with instructions on how to download and install Reflection.

Once you've installed the software, you'll want to take a brief tour of the new user interface.