Top OS/400 Stories from Around the Web

(IT Jungle) The term legacy sticks to the System i like well-chewed gum sticks to the bottom of your shoe. In some ways it's a fair description, but it certainly doesn't describe all that the system is capable of doing. On the other hand, the Windows operating system, which could be labeled as legacy in many ways, is rarely painted with that brush. Let's rethink that. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Pricing and packaging is tricky business. Sometimes it is similar to the three shells and a pea game. The pea is placed under one shell and then the shells get shuffled so that the one with the pea is lost in the shuffle. Then you have to guess where you think the pea is. Keep that thought in mind as you read this article about the WDSc and the RDi tools from IBM. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) The server market on planet Earth continued to grow during 2007 and the additional 8.84 million units have yet to alter our orbit. Just another year in server paradise, right? Pretty much so as small gains in shipments and revenue have been steadily recorded for the past several years now. IBM ranked third in total units shipped. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) IBM loves to use i-words. Integrate is one of the favorites. It has a very positive connotation--like wanting to be a uniter and not a divider. Last week IBM introduced Integrated Support. It unites warranty support for System i, System p, System x, System z, and TotalStorage storage products and technical support for i5/OS, OS/400, AIX, Linux, Windows, and z/OS operating systems under a single contract. READ MORE >

(System iNetwork) Virtualization technology is headline-hogging stuff in the IT world, even though some folks might consider it to be yesterday's news. True, it's not new in our corner of IT, but nonetheless it continues to bring forth new capabilities. For instance, with virtualized storage in V6R1 one partition can host storage as well as support blades for other partitions. With 85 percent of the System i model 570 and 595 users deploying partitioning, virtualization is expected to have sizable impact on the installed base. READ MORE >

(Serach400) Some early feedback on V6R1 is available from this survey. More than half say their shops will upgrade to V6R1 within a year. Fewer than 10 percent say they are interested in a Power6 blade server. There's no indication of the number of survey responders or their demographics. READ MORE >

(Ocheyedan-Melvin Press-News) Osceola County (Iowa) has become a new System i customer. According to this newspaper report, the county is paying $36,187 for a System i 515 Express model with 200 GB LTO 2 and LTO 4 WORM capabilities. The price includes three years of maintenance. Ocheyedan is located in northwest Iowa, about 190 miles west of Rochester, Minnesota. READ MORE >

(System iNetwork) COMMON, for those who are not familiar with the largest user group for System i professionals, is hosting its annual conference next month in Nashville, Tennessee. But the organization's "customized" educational strategy has expanded its reach beyond those who can attend a single national conference. READ MORE >

Vendor Announcements, Promotions, and Deals

(IT Jungle) Any time there's an operating system upgrade, the third-party software vendors hustle to provide applications and tools that support the latest, greatest OS. V6R1 has some challenges, particularly a process called program conversion, that may delay some vendors from being V6R1 ready when the OS comes out of the gate in March. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Supply chain managers who rely on fortune tellers and crystal balls to forecast demand because they can't get the relevant information from their IT systems, should probably seek their fortunes in another line of work. Some forecasting is easier than others, but it only ever gets as good as the information used to arrive at the conclusion. Retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers that deal with erratic patterns of demand need help. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Fishing is still fishing, even if you are using the wrong bait. It's just not smart fishing. The same is true with business intelligence software, but the degree of difficulty in terms of catching something worthwhile increases significantly. In many System i shops, query and reporting is basic business intelligence. You can probably do better. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Lotus Quickr was designed so business users could view, edit, share, and distribute documents and ideas using Web 2.0-style interfaces, such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and e-mail. Last week it was revealed that it is vulnerable to hackers who are savvy enough to take advantage of a cross-site scripting flaw. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Thanks in large part to the Payment Cardholder Industry mandates, thin client users are shopping for SSL encryption capabilities for their affordable PC alternatives running 5250 emulation. Security issues remain a high priority for most organizations and encryption technology continues to be of interest to many IT managers. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Service oriented architecture projects have their bottlenecks just like any other project. File transfers are one of the problem areas. Some organizations attempt to solve this by maintaining file transfer environments that are separate from the enterprise service buses that are central to SOA implementations. There are reasons for not going down that road. READ MORE >

(IT Jungle) Mergers and acquisitions often play hell with data centers. The same can be said about large-scale new application implementations. Ditto for system consolidations. One common component--and common point of failure--is the data migration aspect. It deserves a fair amount of thinking and planning. READ MORE >

Redbooks, White Papers, and Other OS/400 Resources

(System iDeveloper) Shortcuts are like chocolate bars. One will get you through the day, but a box of them will get you through maybe an entire month. Here's a list of WDSC/RSE keyboard shortcuts provided by RPG experts Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, and Paul Tuohy. It includes windows shortcuts, navigation shortcuts, and editing shortcuts. Enough to last you for a while. READ MORE >

(COMMON) The online session guide for the upcoming COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition provides a quick and easy overview of topics that are of interest to System i professionals. Browsing these topic areas and brief session descriptions might give you some ideas for advancing your career or getting a work project off the back burner. READ MORE >

(IBM) All programs moving to i5/OS V6R1, which will be available in March, will need a degree of conversion to run. In order for a program to be converted, its creation data (sometimes referred to as observability) must be available for the system to make use of during a conversion process. Programs created for V5R1 or later have their creation data automatically saved during program creation. Those with programs created for OS/400 V4R5 and earlier need to ensure that the creation data is available for the conversion process. This technical paper provides a focus on what you should expect in terms of conversion processes. READ MORE >

(Bytware) What are your security worries? Perhaps your security policy is shot full of holes or it is time consuming, difficult to manage, or error prone. This white paper distinguishes between an object-based approach and a transaction-based approach. When security is your responsibility, you should know all the potential weaknesses. READ MORE >

Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

See our full calendar of events at
http://www.itjungle.com/fhm/fhm-calendar.html

February 28 -- Fairfield, New Jersey - Guest speaker Fant Steele will discuss open security in i5/OS at the regular monthly meeting of the North Eastern Systems Technology Users (NESTU) meeting. Topics will include ssh, scp, and sftp. A particular emphasis will be on ssh as Steele explains how to install and set it up, how to use it to move data around the network, how it is used to communicate with the HMC, and how to manage resources under program control. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. and will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. LEARN MORE >

February 28 -- Webcast - A session on systems management software featuring Vision Solutions' Vision Direction product will emphasize topics such as reclaiming and proactively managing DASD, improving application performance, reducing planned downtime, and improving high availability and disaster recovery. Raymond Hammell, Vision Solutions architect, will present the information. The event begins at 11 a.m. EST. LEARN MORE >

March 4 -- Webcast - DB2 Web Query for System i, the IBM replacement for Query/400, is featured in this session presented by Gene Cobb. Demonstrations of creating reports, graphs, and dashboards will be presented. The event begins at noon CST. It is being presented by the COMMON user group, and is open to both members and non members. LEARN MORE >

March 5 -- Webinar - This session, titled "Protecting Network Operations and Customer Data," will focus on hardware infrastructure and security best practices. Larry Murphy, a vice president of research and development at VAI, will lead the discussion. Murphy will emphasize a proactive security solution with the capability to preempt threats before business processes are impacted. The event begins at 2 p.m. EST. LEARN MORE >

March 11-13 -- Orlando, Florida - The RPG and DB2 Summit features three days of in-depth education on topics critical to System i developers, including V6R1, RPG IV, ILE, SQL, DB2 for i5/OS, WDSc, XML, PHP and taking RPG applications to the Web. Sessions are presented by the System iDeveloper team of Susan Gantner, Jon Paris, Paul Tuohy and Skip Marchesani. They are joined by guest experts Scott Klement, George Farr, Barbara Morris, Kent Milligan, Mike Cain, and others. The agenda includes more than 50 interactive sessions focused on sharing practical tips and techniques that developers will use on a daily basis. LEARN MORE >

March 11 -- Webinar - A session on high performance data access methods focusing on DB2 for i5/OS will b presented by Dan Cruikshank, a senior consultant for the IBM Systems and Technology Lab Services group. Topics of discussion will include DDL-created objects, the SQE optimizer, journal and commit optimization, minimizing I/O, table expressions, fast count and fast delete, and blocked fetch and insert. Cruikshank is an IBM certified instructor for the DB2 for i5/OS Performance Tuning Workshops. This training session, which is sponsored by Centerfield Technology, begins at noon CST. LEARN MORE >

March 11 -- Orlando, Fla. - Guest speaker Keith Zblewski, an IBM technical specialist, will be discussing a variety of advanced technologies available on System i. Topics include i5/OS running in BladeCenter, improved storage virtualization, new encryption capabilities, enhanced Java performance, enhanced performance with IBM storage area networks, a new approach to Web-based systems management, a major new disk clustering product, iSCSI-based integrated server enhancements, and steps for program conversion on V6R1. The Orlando campus of DeVry University is the event site, and dinner is scheduled for 6:15 p.m. with the presentation at 7. LEARN MORE >

March 11 -- Webinar - Conventional document archiving, management, and usage require multiple steps, even using traditional proprietary electronic document management solutions. This webinar explores how documents of all types--computer generated documents, scanned documents, reports, payments, and correspondence--can be automatically captured, indexed, and archived for easy authorized access, management and distribution using a browser-based interface. It also examines how a unique integration enables access to documents directly from line-of-business applications without leaving the application. LEARN MORE >

March 13 -- Webinar - A session on executive reporting and analysis in the healthcare field is being hosted by New Generation Software (NGS). It is designed for ISVs and features topics such as reducing report backlog, improving collections, raising accountability, and securely expanding data access to managers. NGS' Decision Assist Healthcare solution will be featured. The software benefits include a secure Web portal of ready-to-run patient, revenue, and clinical care reports and analysis built over a DB2 data mart with NGS' business intelligence application development tools. A fully integrated version for users of Siemens Medical Solutions MedSeries4 will also be shown. Sample healthcare dashboards and OLAP models, Microsoft Excel-based reports, and other output options will be presented. LEARN MORE >

March 13 -- Maryland Heights, Missouri - Pete Helgren, president of Value Added Software, will discuss open source applications and integration activities at the monthly meeting of the Gateway/400 Group, an iSeries user group serving the greater St. Louis area. The meeting time is 11:30 a.m. with lunch at noon and the presentation following lunch. RSVP no later than Monday before the meeting date. LEARN MORE >