Alex Woodie
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No Regrets For JDE Shop Following Move To Third-Party Support
March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreLike most technology executives, Dean Foods CIO Brian Murphy has to balance his company’s wants and needs. Its JD Edwards ERP systems must be maintained, but at the same time, employees desire things that make their lives easier, such as a new email system. Murphy found a way to fit both items into his budget after shifting the JD Edwards maintenance and technical support duties from Oracle to Rimini Street.
Dean Foods is a longtime user of the IBM midrange server that’s gone by various names over its nearly four-decade run. The Dallas, Texas-based company is one of the
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Pathfinder Probes For Answers To IBM i Questions
March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe best programmers, by their very nature, are lazy. Why write or buy something new when the function already exists? One of the most popular commercial tools that helps IBM i developers continue to be lazy is Pathfinder, a cross-reference and documentation utility developed by Hawkeye Information Systems. Now with support for RDi and free-form RPG, Pathfinder will help free a new class of developers from programming drudgery.
At its root, Pathfinder is a programming tool. The software was first developed to work with the IBM System/3 back in 1976, and has been brought forward to the IBM i
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Slash Job Scheduler Setup Work by Half, ASCI Says
March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreA new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives.
Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to
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Learn Great Stuff From IBM i Champions At COMMON
March 14, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThere are three things that go into making IBM i a great business platform: bullet-proof hardware, reliable software, and exceptional people. If your organization invests in its people (and don’t laugh, because not every company does), it will be hard to miss this year’s annual COMMON Annual Meeting and Expo, where a group of freshly minted Champions for Power will present some compelling sessions on the platform’s latest technology.
The big annual COMMON show is still nine weeks off, but the schedule is already set. Judging by the session descriptions posted to commons16.sched.org/, you can expect to fill your
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No More Java 6 Support in Next Version of IBM i
March 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreWe don’t know much about the next release of the IBM i operating system, except that it will (probably, maybe) be called version 7.3 and that it will have awesome new features, according to those who have been briefed under non-disclosure agreements. But IBM has already made one thing certain about the new OS: It won’t run Java 6. As IBM i product manager Steve Will explains, it’s time for Java developers to move on.
IBM updated its Java on IBM i developerWorks webpage on February 17 to reflect the fact that IBM i 7.2 will be the last release
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IBM Bolsters Security in 5250 Emulators
March 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM took steps to improve the security of its widely used terminal emulation software for the IBM i server with the version 12 release of its Host Access Client Package. Among the changes in the product–the first major new release of in seven years–are more widespread use of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocol in both the Java-based Host On-Demand (HOD) and Personal Communications for Windows (PCOMM) products.
On February 26, IBM shipped HACP version 12, which includes HOD version 12 and PCOMM version 12. The bundle is the first full refresh of the HACP package since IBM shipped
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IBM Shuffles IBM i CDC Function and Data Replication Tool
March 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIf your IBM i shop uses change data capture (CDC) software from IBM, you’ll be interested to know that last week IBM announced that it’s no longer selling the InfoSphere Change Data Capture for DB2 on IBM i as a separate product. It made the change because that same IBM i-based CDC engine can now be found in the latest release of its InfoSphere Data Replication product.
InfoSphere Change Data Capture traces its lineage directly to DataMirror’s Transformation Server, the journal-based data replication tool at the center of IBM’s acquisition of DataMirror in July 2007. Nearly a year
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IBM Patches Pair Of TLS Flaws In IBM i
March 7, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreIBM i shops are encouraged to be vigilant following a pair of security vulnerabilities that have emerged in the encryption protocols used by the platform. This includes the SLOTH vulnerability in the IBM i JVM that IBM patched February 15. But a bigger threat looms in the form of DROWN, a potentially significant vulnerability in the SSL/TLS stack that IBM patched on March 1.
IBM issued a series of patches to address the SLOTH vulnerability in the IBM i JVMs. According to IBM’s Security Bulletin for SLOTH, a problem with the IBM i JVM’s implementation of the TLS 1.2
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HelpSystems Spies Overseas Expansion With Tango/04 Buy
February 29, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreHelpSystems CEO Chris Heim told IT Jungle that his company’s acquisition of rival IBM i software maker Tango/04 Computing Group last week marks the beginning of an aggressive push into the overseas market. The deal for Tango/04 will jumpstart HelpSystems’ presence in Southern Europe and Latin America, but there’s a lot more room for expansion, he says.
While North America is far and away the biggest market for IBM i goods and services, the platform has always enjoyed strong overseas sales and has an international presence that is arguably bigger than it is in the United States. IBM makes about
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SEQUEL Data Warehouse Picks Up Where RODIN Left Off
February 22, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreNot every IBM i shop needs a big data warehouse to store and analyze information about their operations. But for those organizations whose data needs go beyond basic reporting capabilities, it is good to know there are tools like HelpSystems‘ SEQUEL Data Warehouse, which was formally called RODIN and which the company just released at version 8.0 with substantial new functionality.
It has been a year-and-a-half since HelpSystems acquired Coglin Mill, the Rochester, Minnesota, based company that developed RODIN. Once dubbed “the IBM i platforms best-kept secret,” RODIN provided enterprise-grade data preparation capabilities and extract, transform, and load (ETL)