We'll Get By with a Little Help from Our Friends

Published: September 18, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you really want to know what's going on in the i5/OS and OS/400 market, you have to talk to the actual users of the gear. And The Four Hundred devotes a considerable amount of time to talking to users for that very reason.

We are working on a number of stories where we would like some input from users. When we have a broad topic, it is easy to find users who can relate to that topic. But we are working on a series of stories with very specific topics we want to talk about. Which means we cannot just go to our Rolodex and call the usual suspects. In fact, we need your help so we can better understand why you do the things you do and therefore help explain to others why they should do--or not do--what you do.

So, if you fit the profile of any of the following stories and you would like to participate in one or more of these stories, please go to the Contact form on the IT Jungle site and volunteer. Here are the stories that we would like some input on:

• If you are new to the iSeries or System i platform, we would love to talk to you. By "new," we mean that you are either installing a midrange box and applications for the first time (which seems highly unlikely, but possible) or are moving from a Windows, Unix, or mainframe platform over to i5/OS or OS/400. If you have made such a move in the past two years, we'll call that new. Coming from a System/36 or System/38 does not count as new to the platform.
• If you are an independent software vendor that has ported your applications to OS/400 and/or i5/OS within the past two years, we would also love to talk to you. Porting to Power-based Linux or using the PASE runtime environment does not count; neither does running AIX application in a logical partition on an AS/400, iSeries, or i5.
• If you have implemented Linux partitions on your iSeries or i5 server, we'd like to hear your story about what you did and why.
• If you have implemented AIX partitions on your iSeries or i5 server, we'd also like to hear from you.
• If you have implemented native Domino groupware on an AS/400, iSeries, or i5 server, we would like to tell your story about why you picked Domino over the alternatives.
• If you have implemented Microsoft Exchange groupware, either on outboard X86 or X64 Windows servers attached to your AS/400, iSeries, or i5 server or on the Integrated xSeries Server co-processor running Windows, we want to talk to you about why you didn't pick Domino, why you did pick Exchange, and why you architected your Exchange setup the way you did.
• If you have recently--meaning within the past two years--implemented a supply chain management solution natively on the OS/400 or i5/OS platform, we would like to know all about what you did.
• If you have recently installed customer relationship management software natively on the OS/400 or i5/OS platform, we want to know what you did and why. If you have decided to use Salesforce.com or another CRM application service provider instead of going native, we would also like to hear from you.

We look forward to hearing your stories, and telling them to others so they can learn from your experience. Thanks in advance for your help.