Remain Bolsters TD/OMS in v16 Release
November 8, 2023 Alex Woodie
Rogue or uninformed programmers will be shut out of making negative code changes to their IBM i applications with TD/OMS V16.0 Milestone 1, the inaugural release of the next major version of Remain Software’s IBM i change management software. New dashboards, training, and ChatGPT integrations also grace this new release.
According to Remain Software CTO Wim Jongman, the new arbitrary code execution protection feature delivered with TD/OMS V16.0 last month was developed in response to customers that were suffering when programmers exploited their freedom to do not-so-smart things with the organization’s IBM i code.
Sometimes, the freedom is necessary. “For example, a programmer can define an override for a compile instruction to replace some options for a CRTBNDRPG command,” Jongman said. “However, a rogue programmer could also insert a call to a program that they wrote to compile the program AND update a record in the production database”
Some parts of TD/OMS also allow the execution of user exit code. That could be used for legitimate means, such as to stop a subsystem before a deployment starts on a target machine. Or it could be abused, such as by a bad programmer who inserts some other code that TD/OMS would execute naively, Jongman said.
“Of course, your internal programmers will not likely try these things, but a large financial institution has a zero-trust policy,” Jongman told IT Jungle. “We restricted all exit function definitions to a particular group profile. If the group profile exists, the user must be part of it to create exits. Even TD/OMS Administrator Roles cannot escape it. This way, the creation of exit functions can be put in a special process that involves multiple people.”
The new analytics dashboard in V16.0 will enable organizations to help their developers stay on top of tasks. It will do this by turning raw data collected by TD/OMS into useful key performance indicators (KPIs), which the dashboard will prioritize for the administrator.
The analytics dashboard in TD/OMS V16.0 will prioritize KPIs for the administrator based on which metrics are out of compliance.
For instance, the top item on the dashboard could indicate tasks that have sat for more than a week in test, Jongman said. Or another KPI could show a developer has exceeded the organization’s guidance that an individual developer can only have five tasks active at one time, he said. “We are adding new visualizations with every release,” he added.
Remain Software is in the process of moving all TD/OMS configurations (which were previously confined to a greenscreen) into a GUI. The company has made more progress with V16.0, as the company has added the workflow definition to the GUI, Jongman said.
The Dutch company has also bolstered its training material for TD/OMS by making the training accessible directly inside of the product.
In the past, Remain would conduct a day of in-classroom training to get customers up-to-speed on the product. In recent years, it has shifted to online training via two-hour chunks on various TD/OMS topics.
With V16.0, the company is breaking up those two-hour chunks into a larger number of two-minute segments, which are available on demand from directly inside of the application, via calls to YouTube.
“It is much better for the learning process if we do not try to force-feed them all options in one session. It will just fry their brains,” Jongman said. “And even after the training, people go, yeah, I remember I did this in the training, but where do I start again?”
The company plans to add many more two-minute videos, which it can do by simply updating a JSON file on the Web. “We can also include corporate-specific training videos and documentation in the same spot,” Jongman added.
Finally, the company is making it easier for customers to get started with the ChatGPT integration, which the company unveiled earlier this year at COMMON’s POWERUp conference in Denver, Colorado.
With V16.0, Remain is including a complementary AI Chat subscription, which eliminates the need for customers to acquire tokens from OpenAI to utilize the ChatGPT integration. “We detect if the user has a product license and then let them use a complimentary token automatically,” Jongman said.
Remain also released a new release of Octo, the Web-based orchestration layer and framework that unites its various products and provide a common dashboard. Stay tuned for coverage of the new Octo release in a future issue of The Four Hundred.
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