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OS/400 Edition
Volume 2, Number 19 -- May 16, 2003
   In This Issue

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Top OS/400 Stories from Around the Web

(Guild Companies) IBM announced a new server in the iSeries product line on Tuesday. The new entry-level iSeries Model 810 will help the company and its sales channel pursue opportunities at small and midsized businesses that like the low prices of the Model 800 but want a machine that can run the full enterprise edition of OS/400 and get more 5250 OLTP processing capacity in the bargain. IBM also announced several new upgrade paths to Model 810 and Model 825 servers from prior generations of machines.
(iSeries Network) This article explains this week's iSeries announcements in an abbreviated format, quickly running through all of the new features IBM announced.
(Guild Companies) SSA Global Technologies agreed last week to acquire Elevon, a publicly traded company that develops e-business applications for IBM mainframes. SSA GT also announced that Warehouse BOSS, the OS/400-based warehouse management system it acquired from Computer Associates last year, now can be directly connected to the company's BPCS ERP system.
(Guild Companies) COMMON officials have begun releasing information about their fall IT education conference and expo in Orlando, Florida, scheduled for September 7 through September 11. Gartner vice president Tom Bittman will give the keynote address. The meeting will also feature a behind-the-scenes tour of the AS/400-based IT department of Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure, as well as tickets to ride the Spider Man and Incredible Hulk rides at Universal's theme park. A security-oriented conference within the conference is also being planned, and there are some changes in pricing for hotel and conference registration.
(iSeries Network) COMMON is raising its conference registration fee for the third time in three years. What's worse, if you don't stay at the Gaylord Palms & Convention Center in Orlando, COMMON's official hotel for the fall conference, you'll have to pay a $100 charge. So be prepared to pay a little bit more this COMMON, regardless of whether you're staying in Kissimmee-St. Cloud to reduce your travel expenses.
(iSeries Network) Sources within IBM say Big Blue's Server Group is hard at work developing an autonomic computing feature that detects when partitions need more power and automatically allocates processors where they are needed. However, Barsa Consulting is selling a product called Automatic Partition Resource Manager for iSeries that automatically manages the allocation of partition resources.
(Guild Companies) IBM last week upgraded its pSeries 655 midrange and pSeries 670 and pSeries 690 enterprise servers with significantly faster Power4+ processors, while at the same time extending the On Demand features it offers in the pSeries line. The expanded performance and On Demand features, such as memory Capacity on Demand (CoD), are previews of technology that could soon appear in the iSeries line. The pSeries now has trial and temporary CoD, mimicking capabilities already in the iSeries midrange lines.
(Guild Companies) A recent survey by the Information Technology Association of America concluded that unless there is a dramatic recovery in the U.S. economy within the next year, it's unlikely that American IT workers will return to normal levels of hiring and compensation. The study shows demand for IT workers is continuing to drop in the United States, even as the number of layoffs has slowed and the overall size of the IT market has stabilized at around 10.3 million workers.
(eWeek) First iPod and iTunes, now iTools for serving up Apache in Mac OS X. Somebody should tell IBM that Apple's stealing the letter "i" away from them.
(Guild Companies) ERP software maker PeopleSoft said last week that it would port 170 software modules to Linux and plans a fourth quarter delivery. But the kicker is that these modules will be available only for Intel processors. This is good news, but not good enough. IBM clearly has time to work with PeopleSoft on Linux-on-iSeries versions of its software and to take another whack at attacking the OS/400 marketplace with new applications.
(InternetWeek) There's trouble in Linux city, as SCO Group threatened to sue commercial Linux users because, it claims, Linux is an "unauthorized derivative" of Unix. The company also announced plans to suspend Linux sales in order to focus on Unix and Web services technology. These announcements came not too long after SCO's $1 billion lawsuit against IBM for taking parts of its Unix code and making them available to the Linux community "in an unlawful way."

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Vendor Announcements, Promotions, And Deals

(IBM) Following up on Tuesday's iSeries announcements, here's the official United States announcement letter from IBM detailing all the enhancements to the iSeries product line.
(IBM) Big Blue announced the 7206 Model VX2 external large-capacity tape drive for iSeries, featuring increased tape capacity (up to 80 GB native and 160 GB with 2:1 compression); high data transfer rates of up to 6.0 MB per second; and data packet formatting to help improve data protection.
(IBM) IBM also announced that it is dropping the price of the 7206 Model VX2 external tape drive, just as it's becoming available for the iSeries. In the United States and Puerto Rico, the price is dropping from $3,200 to $2,995.
(IBM) IBM is changing its ordering options for a number of software offerings (including DB2, WebSphere, Lotus, and Tivoli), so that these products now will be available exclusively through Passport Advantage.
(Guild Companies) IBM announced two new LTO tape libraries last week. Big Blue's new entry-level 3582 tape library uses the latest LTO Ultrium 2 tape drives, while an updated version of the midrange 3583 library allows users to intermix LTO 1 with LTO 2 drives and tapes. LTO 2 offers double the capacity and data-transfer speed of first-generation LTO drives, and it has other benefits as well.
(eWeek) IBM on Wednesday announced a new tool for its WebSphere Portal server, Application Portlet Builder for Domino, which allows users to build portals around enterprise application functionality based on Domino.
(eWeek) IBM acquired Canadian automation software vendor ThinkDynamics for an undisclosed sum. The deal already has been completed and the company's products will be sold under IBM's Tivoli software brand.
(Guild Companies) Bug Busters Software Engineering recently announced a new version of its a la Carte menu and security system (ALC), a tool for creating green-screen menus and managing access to OS/400 objects. With ALC 3.0, the Seattle software company has added ease-of-use features, such as support for custom function keys and the capability to track the use of menus, and there are several other improvements in the way administrators and users create and maintain menus.
(InformationWeek) Computer Associates announced a fourth quarter loss of $106 million; the company lost $238 million a year ago. Computer Associates also reported a 4 percent increase in revenue.
(TechWeb) Storage leader EMC announced a pair of Web-based subscription services--both of which are extensions for the company's ControlCenter storage management software--that assist IT staffs in designing and managing storage area networks.
(CNET News.com) In its quarterly report, Gateway disclosed that the U.S. Attorney's office has started an investigation into the PC vendor's accounting practices. The time period and subject matter are the same as those being reviewed in an ongoing probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
(CNET News.com) Siebel Systems said last week that it received an inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission about a possible violation of a regulation aimed at preventing companies from selectively doling out important financial information.
(Guild Companies) Sky IT Group last week introduced Business Intelligence to-go for iSeries, a bundled iSeries-based package that includes business intelligence software from Information Builders, installed at the factory on a new iSeries Model 810. By pre-installing software on the Model 810 and delivering expert configuration services, the company says, users can analyze their data quickly, for less than $80,000.

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New Redbooks, White Papers, and Other OS/400 Resources

(Aldon Computer Group) Aldon is offering three white papers dealing with application modernization, source control, and testing.
(IBM) IBM recently started providing Redbook readers with an opportunity to rate each Redbook on a scale from one to five stars. Big Blue then takes those ratings and produces a list of top-rated Redbooks. However, this survey has limited value, because the top-rated book only has 27 reviews, and, once you get past the top 10 books, most books were reviewed by less than six people. But the ratings will become more valuable over time, and it's interesting to see which Redbooks your fellow IT professionals voted for, including the two iSeries books that cracked the top 20.
(IBM) Draft Redbook -- iSeries Server Migration System Migration and Upgrades at V5R2 and V5R1 discusses the issues involved in migrating to IBM's PCI, PCI-X, POWER4 processors, and high-speed link (HSL) technologies on the new iSeries iron introduced in 2003 (including the 800, 810, 825, 870, and 890 models). This is a good resource when planning an upgrade or a migration to a new iSeries server.
(Guild Companies) If you're evaluating whether to deploy enterprise applications on an iSeries or a Windows box, Guild Companies put out an interesting article last month that did a lot of the comparisons for you. This article examined the issues and has a chart that compare capabilities, list prices, and costs per TPM for a number of different iSeries, Windows, and Unix boxes.
(Tango/04 Computing Group) Tango/04 is offering a free white paper on "Corporate Monitoring Strategies: an iSeries Approach." This paper is available for download at the company's Web site.

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Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings

May-November -- ASNA has added a number of one-day seminars on ASNA Visual RPG and Caviar and running AVR for .NET. Seminars will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina; Hartford, Connecticut; San Francisco; Denver; St. Louis; Houston; and Guildford, England. For a complete list of seminar topics, locations, and dates, go to www.asna.com/0303_ASNA_Visions_seminars.asp.


May 19 -- iSeries professionals in the greater Washington, D.C., area can take advantage of a continuing series of technical seminars organized through the cooperative efforts of two local user groups: Washington Area Midrange and Mid Atlantic Midrange. Go to www.wash-midrange.org/seminars.html for details and a list of upcoming seminars and locations. Next up is "Life Beyond SEU - The New WDSc Toolset for RPG & COBOL Programmers" presented by Susan Gantner May 19, in Richmond, Va., May 20, in College Park, Md., and May 22, in Ft. Washington, Pa.
May 19-23 -- IBM presents the IBM Software Symposium 2003 in Munich, Germany. Covering the entire spectrum of IBM solutions, this symposium offers more than 200 technology demonstration points, track education, breakout sessions, networking opportunities, and Dr. Henry Kissinger, Nobel Laureate and international statesman, as an external keynote speaker. Go to www-3.ibm.com/events/symposium2003/showcase.shtml for more information.
May 20 -- Information Availability Institute will host a number of free workshops focused on the management and interrelationship of networks, applications, security, databases, servers, and storage. Venues include Houston (May 20), and Winnipeg, Manitoba (June 2). Go to www.availabilityinstitute.org for more details.
May 22 -- Tom Huntington, vice president of technical services for Help/Systems, will host a Webinar on the company's new Robot/TRANSFORM E-Conference product. TRANSFORM E-Conference translates the content of OS/400-based electronic forms packages from PCL (Hewlett-Packard's printer language) or AFP (IBM's printer language) to PDF. Go to Help/Systems' Web site to learn more.
May 21 -- The Toronto User Group's meeting features "High Availability for the Real World," presented by Mike Warkentin of DataMirror and "EDI and the Internet" presented by Jeff Meltzer of EXTOL. Go to www.tug.on.ca/t_agenda.html#TEC2003 for more information.
May 25-27 -- The COMMON European Congress will hold its 2003 conference in Warsaw, Poland. Like its U.S. counterpart, the European show will present iSeries education, presentations, and a vendor exposition. Go to http://comeur.org/cec2003/ for more information.
May-July -- Aldon Computer Group will present its user group tour at various user group meetings throughout the United States. Go to www.aldon.com/events/user_tour.html for a list of meetings that Aldon will attend.
June -- Bytware is conducting several workshops to help customers take advantage of the most valuable features of Bytware's monitoring, security, and paging products. Workshop topics include MessengerPlus, StandGuard, and MessengerConsole. Go to www.bytware.com/edu.htm for more information.
June 9-12 -- J.D. Edwards presents the Quest Global Conference (formally known as JDE Focus). Staged in Denver, this conference centers on user-driven education, training, and speakers, with a J.D. Edwards focus. Go to the J.D. Edwards Web site for more information.
June 15-18 -- The 2003 iSeries & AS/400 Connection Conference offers four days of iSeries education at the Registry Resort in Naples, Florida. The iSeries educational tracks focus on application development, Java, SQL, e-business, operations, and security. Speakers include Dr. Frank Soltis, Al Barsa Jr., Allison Butterill, Wayne O. Evans, Susan Gantner, Janet Krueger, Jon Paris, Jim Sloan, and Howard F. Arner Jr. Go to www.tramenco.com/naples for more information and registration.
June 23-27 -- IBM presents its iSeries Technical Conference at the Hilton Hotel and Resort in Las Vegas. According to IBM, this is the place where technical experts and programmers can get their questions answered by IBM's best Rochester and Toronto experts. Go to www-3.ibm.com/services/learning/conf/us/iseries/ for more information.
July 17 -- The OCEAN iSeries User Group will present its 10th annual one-day "Catch the Wave" iSeries technical conference and vendor expo at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 17900 Jamboree Boulevard, Irvine, California. Training sessions will be conducted by Bob Cozzi, Allison Butterill, and Wayne O. Evans, on topics such as RPG IV Advanced Techniques, WebSphere Development Tools, iSeries Security and Infrastructure. Dr. Frank Soltis will be the keynote speaker. Go to www.ocean400.org for more information.
July 20-23 -- LANSA presents its 2003 International LANSA Conference at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago. The conference includes product education, customer success stories, strategic directions, hands-on labs, and roundtable discussions. The keynote speaker will be IBM's Malcolm Haines of the IBM eServer iSeries Marketing group. Go to www.lansa.com/conference/index.htm for more information.
September 7-11 -- The COMMON user group presents its fall 2003 conference and expo in Orlando, Florida. Meet industry experts, attend hands-on labs, exchange information with fellow professionals, attend a multitude of educational tracks, and get real-world solutions at the vendor expo. Go to the COMMON Web site for more information and to register.
October 13-17 -- IBM presents an iSeries Technical Conference at the Renaissance Hotel in Orlando, Florida. According to IBM, this is the place where technical experts and programmers can get their questions answered by IBM's most knowledgeable Rochester and Toronto experts. Go to www-3.ibm.com/services/learning/conf/us/iseries/ for more information.
November 18-21 -- EXTOL will host its 2003 user conference at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix, Arizona. Attendees registering during May receive a 30 percent discount and the tutorial program at no charge. Go to www.extol.com/forms/uc2003/confinfo.cfm for more information.
April 28-30, 2004 -- ASNApalooza 2004 will be held at the Westin River Walk Hotel in San Antonio. ASNApalooza is three days of ASNA Visual RPG instruction and technical insight, with an emphasis on the RPG development environment for Microsoft's .NET platform. If you register by May 31, you can attend the conference for $900, a savings of $1,100 off the regular price for registration. Go to www.asna.com/0303_ASNA_Visions_palooza2004.asp for more information.

Editor: Joe Hertvik
Managing Editor: Shannon Pastore
Publisher and Advertising Director: Jenny Thomas
Advertising Sales Representative: Kim Reed
If you have a resource, event, or any other interesting item that you want to see publicized in Midrange Monitor, send an e-mail to Joe Hertvik

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THIS ISSUE
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