• Mobile Developers Battle Complexity, Deployment Time

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  It is a simple and irreversible fact that application development teams are consumed by mobile computing. Smartphones and tablets have put the pressure on companies in the IBM midrange community (users of IBM i on Power Systems, i5/OS on iSeries, and OS/400 on AS/400s), where it is not far-fetched to say 50 percent are still dependent on the green-screen interface. A reluctance to convert at least some of their applications to a graphical interface is coming around to haunt them. Meanwhile, there are businesses, particularly start-ups, that recognize the power of the graphical user interface and that the need to

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• IBM Adds IBM i Support To Traveler And Kills Lotus Name

  December 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Great news for IBM i shops: IBM will enable Traveler, the email and messaging server for mobile devices, to run on the IBM i operating system as part of the forthcoming Notes/Domino version 9.0 platform, the company has announced. Big Blue also said that, with the launch of Notes/Domino 9.0 Social Edition in the first quarter of 2013, it will no longer use the Lotus name, marking the end of the 20-year-old, sunny yellow brand. IBM takes a tremendous amount of flack for its seemingly endless re-branding exercises, and at least some of it is well deserved. IBM’s marketers did

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• Power Systems Cloud Builders Get Huge Discounts

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is good news for Power Systems shops who are looking to move some of their IBM i and AIX applications out to the cloud or use cloudy capacity managed by a third party for disaster recovery. First, Big Blue is licensing both IBM i and AIX under special terms to managed service providers, or MSPs as they are called. And second, IBM has just launched a special utility pricing deal for MSPs that gives them deep discounts as they build out their initial Power-based clouds. Both moves will go a long way toward lowering the initial capital expenditures that

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• Admin Alert: Strategically Using Power Systems’ Processor Trial Capacity On Demand

  November 28, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  IBM Power system customers usually buy more capacity than they need. A customer may buy an eight processor Power 720 machine but only activate five processors, leaving the additional processors for future growth. Because it’s expensive to activate Power system processors, IBM offers a program called Trial Capacity on Demand (TCoD) that allows you to test whether additional processors will alleviate system bottlenecks before you purchase. What Is TCoD? Trial Capacity on Demand (TCoD) is an IBM program that allows you to activate already existing system processors for 30 days at no charge. The intent is to allow users to

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• Glenn Wants To Know More Facts About Special Values

  November 28, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I found your article 10 Facts You Should Know about Special Values very interesting. I have a few questions related to a command I am writing. –Glenn I owe Glenn an apology. He is one of the many people whose email I never responded to. I’m sorry, Glenn. Sometimes life presents too many opportunities. Here’s Glenn’s first question: 1. If a user specifies *ALL for a parameter, how do you prevent the user from typing in other values? Fair enough. Define *ALL in the Single Value (SNGVAL) keyword, not in the Special Value (SPCVAL) keyword. CMD PROMPT('Do it') PARM KWD(RPTTYPE)

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• Write Your Own SCANRPL Built-In Function

  November 28, 2012 Bob Cozzi

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Until IBM i v7.1 has made a pervasive appearance on virtually all IBM systems, the cool new v7.1 updates to RPG IV are out of reach for many RPG developers. Fortunately, with IBM i v7.1, IBM has finally stopped “point release” updates to the RPG compiler, giving us the ability to use anything implemented on (for example) technology refresh 5 all the way back to TR1. Life is good for RPG developers today. If you’re a software developer or, like me, consulting with clients that have everything from

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• Jinfonet Speeds In-Memory OLAP with ‘Push Down’ Technology

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations slicing and dicing data using Jinfonet Software‘s JReport software should see a speed boost when they upgrade to version 11.1, which was unveiled earlier this month. The new release features new “push down” technology that Jinfonet says will greatly speed up OLAP creation and analysis. JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that includes four core modules, including a drag-and-drop report designer, a report distribution and management tool, an ad-hoc reporting and multi-dimensional module, and a dashboard module, which was unveiled earlier this year with JReport 11. The software runs on any Java-based Web application

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• m-Power Tested in NiSUG’s Mobile Challenge

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The folks at mrc‘s U.K. office are talking up the mobile prowess of their m-Power tool after participating recently in an IBM i development challenge sponsored by NiSUG. NiSUG (National iSeries User Group) held its first annual development challenge, called the “Application Modernisation Shoot Out,” at the COMMON GB event it put on in October 2011. Six vendors participated in that challenge, including mrc, which was very vocal about its success, along with competitor Profound Logic. When the NiSUG held another IBM i challenge at the 2012 International Power event in London earlier this month, mrc was

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• STORServer Updates GUI Management Console for Backup Offering

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  STORServer, a developer of backup arrays based on Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), recently unveiled a new release of its GUI console used for managing its backup offerings and controlling the TSM environment. The new console features support for client-node replication, among other features. STORServer sells a line of integrated backup appliances that include all the X64 hardware and TSM software needed to back up data residing on a variety of servers, including the IBM i server. The STORServer offerings also include a GUI called the STORServer Console (SSC) that simplifies TSM tasks that otherwise would require the use of

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• Vacation Plans Get in the Way of Maxava v. Vision Trial

  November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  A pre-paid vacation has gotten in the way of the trial scheduled to begin next April in Maxava‘s trade libel case against Vision Solutions. The two-and-a-half week vacation for a lawyer for Sirius, a co-defendant in the case, caused the parties to delay the trial date from early April to late May. In a status conference on September 17, lawyers for Maxava, Vision, and Sirius agreed to a trial date of April 2, and a pretrial conference date of March 21. However, the trial date conflicted with the pre-paid, two-and-a-half week vacation of Sirius lawyer Friedrich Seitz.

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