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January 21, 2012: Volume 14, Number 3
January 14, 2012: Volume 14, Number 2
January 7, 2012: Volume 14, Number 1
December 31, 2011: Volume 13, Number 17
December 24, 2011: Volume 13, Number 16
December 17, 2011: Volume 13, Number 15
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The new year is well under way and IBM, as we report elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, has closed out last year and is facing whatever new challenges it has. The big one is that new Opteron 6200 processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Sparc T4 processors from Oracle are out, and the even bigger problem is that the Xeon E5 processors from Intel are shipping under NDA to selected customers and are expected to launch this quarter.
Steve Pitcher has a major beef with IBM. No, it's not about the confusing naming schemes that Big Blue has cooked up for his beloved IBM i platform (that's just a minor beef). The big one has to do with the fact that some key IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software doesn't run on the IBM i platform. But instead of quietly stewing about it, Pitcher has set out to change things, and judging from his experience at last week's Lotusphere conference, he's having success.
IBM closed out 2011 on a somewhat somber note in terms of hardware sales, but not because of the Power Systems line. That's good news for any customer that relies on Power Systems, and so is the fact that Big Blue is stealing away business from Unix rivals Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, and so is IBM's frank admission that Power7-based machines are also taking share away from System z mainframes in the enterprise segment of the server racket.
Being prepared for a disaster makes good business sense, especially with the recent spate of major disasters occurring recently in the United States. For IBM i shops, disaster preparedness requires a little extra planning and capability. One company that's growing its specialized IBM i disaster recovery (DR) service business is TECA Data Safe, which provides everything a company needs to recover its IBM i environment, including servers, bandwidth, and--most importantly--experienced staff.
IBM is moving its LotusLive hosting service for Notes onto its SmartCloud infrastructure and calling it SmartCloud for Social Business, the company announced at last week's Lotusphere. The company also unveiled several new software and services that will be sold under the SC4SB umbrella, including new releases of its flagship social networking platform IBM Connections; an embeddable version of the Lotus Notes social networking features; a new productivity suite called IBM Docs; and new clients for Blackberrys and the new Windows Phone.
You can't beat free. Earlier this month, Raz-Lee Security announced that it's giving away copies of its IBM i antivirus software, which is based on the open source ClamAV engine. The free version doesn't include some of the more advanced features that are available in the enterprise version of the software, but it will help IBM i shops detect and eliminate Windows malware that can infect and be distributed via the Integrated File System.
Portals are not dead. They've just been sleeping. Almost all highly hyped technology eventually moves into reality, where the effects of market consolidation and sometimes technology commoditization can dull a formerly bright star. But this could be a better time and place for portals thanks to social media and cloud computing. The big guys--IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and a few others are poised. While some smaller vendors are featuring lighter weight and lower cost products.
Symtrax last week unveiled Compleo Suite 5, a major new version of its line of output management software for IBM i and other platforms. With version 5, Symtrax has added a Web-based interface for the first time, providing an alternative to its Windows-based client. Better backups of critical documents, workflow capabilities, and new support for inputting additional document types round out this release.
The eagle flies on Friday is an old-time euphemism for Friday is payday. For a lot of folks these days, the eagle doesn't fly as high as it once did. And others aren't so sure that eagle isn't really a vulture circling overhead.
It will be easier to automatically send emails from your IBM i applications using the latest release of KeyesMail, an IBM i-based email package developed by Computer Keyes. With KeyesMail version 9, the Woodway, Washington, company has rewritten the APIs to make them easier to use.
IBM has revealed one possible contender for data storage that we might see far into the future. In a paper presented by techies from the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, Big Blue is showing off that it can encode a bit of data in a dozen iron atoms using antiferromagnetic properties of the atoms.
Limited capabilities is a widely used security function of IBM i. User profiles have an attribute named limited capabilities or LMTCAP. CL commands have an attribute named allow limited capabilities users or ALWLMTUSR). CL commands set to ALWLMTUSR(*NO) cannot be run from a command line by user profiles set to LMTCAP(*YES). To be more precise, these commands cannot be run from a command line, the command-entry display, FTP, REXEC, the QCAPCMD API, or as an option from a command grouping menu.
An enterprise server is almost as hard to get rid of as it is to get the bean counters to pay for it in the first place. That is why server makers sometimes sweeten their new server acquisition deals by agreeing to take back old boxes when customers buy new boxes.
Over the past few years I've done quite a lot of PHP coding alongside my RPG work, and PHP's extensive use of arrays has furthered my conviction that we RPGers just don't use arrays nearly enough. There are many reasons for this, of course, one of which is RPG's limited ability to sort and search arrays.
RJS Software Systems, which has been on a product integration kick of late, last week announced that a new release of its Windows-based WebDocs document management and routing software can now be used directly with WebForms, its online forms offering, resulting in heightened usability.
I'm trying to export one of my i5/OS digital certificates into a PC file for server installation. Every time I try the export function, I get the message: An error occurred while opening files to write. What's going on and how can I export the certificate to a file? I'm running i5/OS V5R4M5.
