Four Hundred Monitor, May 17
May 17, 2017 Dan Burger
For many IBM i local user groups, existence is hanging on by its fingertips. There are exceptions though and this week Monitor points you to an article highlighting a local user group success story. You’ve probably read the IT Jungle stories that have chronicled events surrounding the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition in Orlando, Florida, last week.
And for those of you without a care in the world (We can pretend, can’t we?), we’ve included scary articles about bring your own device warnings and the loss of IT control nightmares.
Top Stories From Outside The Jungle
(IBM Systems Magazine) Most of the IBM i local user groups are in decline. Attendance at monthly meetings ain’t what it used to be. But there’s always someone out there bucking that trend and proud (as they should be) of what they are accomplishing.
(MCPress) IBM i observer Steve Pitcher attended the 2017 COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition last week with a new perspective. He’s on the COMMON Board of Directors for one thing, so he’s going to see things a little more from the inside out as opposed to most of us who see it from the outside in.
(InfoWeek) What are the greatest fears of CISOs and other security team members, according to a new study with smartphones in the spotlight? That BYOD policy (or lack of policy) is something you might want to examine a little more closely.
(ZDNet) IT teams are supposed to have a holistic understanding of the business IT environment and manage it so there’s an efficient, cohesive vision and strategy for the overall business. When IT is being bypassed, the ability for the organization to be strategic with its IT investment is negatively impacted.
Redbooks, White Papers, and Other Resources
(IBM) The IBM open source wiki page includes links to a boatload of information. Topics like speakers and their presentations, developer tools, requests for enhancements, and the licensed open source offerings are just a click away.
(COMMON) Coming in June is the COMMON Boot Camp, online education for the inexperienced RPG programmer (10 sessions) or system administrator (17 sessions). The overview of these sessions are posted now.
(IBM) The IBM Watson developer community lives here. Getting started tutorials, finding tools, resources, documentation, and a question and answer forum—it’s all here.
(System i Developer) Programmers are always on the lookout for great productivity tips. As more IBM i developers shift to RDi as their primary development environment, they will need to get up to speed with Remote System Explorer, which forms the base of RDi. These “Favorite RSE Keyboard Shortcuts” by Susan Gantner will surprise you with the difference they make.
Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings
May 18 — Parsippany, New Jersey – The North Eastern Systems Technology Users (NESTU) group is hosting a one-day educational opportunity featuring three sessions: Open Source ILE Concepts, Web Services Via RPG, and a topic yet to be determined. Guest speaker is IBM Power Systems/Cognitive Systems Champion Liam Allan. There will be two afternoon sessions and one in the evening. The meeting will be held at the Tandoori Flames restaurant located at 1557 Route 46 East.
May 22 — Bloomington, Minnesota – A one-day workshop featuring Rational Developer for IBM i is being hosted by QUSER, the local user group for IBM midrange professionals in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Guest speaker is RDi subject matter expert Charles Guarino. Topics include RSE navigation, views, preferences and the LPEX source code editor. The workshop location is the offices of Universal Hospital Services located at 6625 West 78th Street.
May 22-26 — Orlando, Florida – IBM Systems Technical University is a training and skills event featuring Power Systems, z Systems, and storage. Sessions are tailored for executives, business managers, data center managers, tech support managers, project managers, systems and application programmers, IT architects, and systems and database admins. Thirty-nine IBM i-specific session are on the agenda.
June 13 & 14 — London, England – The International iPower Conference is a two-day event that features educational labs and hands-on workshops on day one and lecture-type sessions on day two. Session topics include security, SQL development, Watson analytics, cloud strategies, business intelligence, and in-depth examinations of IBM i and DB2.
June 13 & 14 — Virtual Conference – Twice a year, COMMON stages a virtual conference with online educational sessions featuring topics such as: open source on IBM i, Web development using RPG, XML services, accessing and managing IBM i, virtualization, high availability, and mobile access. It’s free!
