Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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CNX Goes Native with Mobile Framework
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
CNX is gearing up to release a native application for smartphones and tablets with the next release of its application development framework for IBM i customers.
With the launch of Valence 4.1, which is slated to become available in mid-November, CNX will, for the first time, offer its mobile portal as a native smartphone app. The company will be targeting iOS first, to be followed by Android support in 2015.
“The big news is that we’re introducing a native iOS portal app for accessing the IBM i server instance,” says Robert Swanson, a senior partner with CNX. “The new native
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SoCal Water District Taps Bytware for Server Monitoring
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
The extreme drought that has engulfed California is forcing everybody to conserve. For citizens, that means using less water and (the horror!) installing artificial turf. Faced with lower revenues, local water districts have also tightened their belts.
Coachella Valley Water District provides water to people through 2,000 miles of piping covering a 1,000-square-mile area near Palm Springs, one of the driest places on earth. Conservation of precious resources like water is a way of life there.
At the CVWD, conservation of IT resources is also a way of life. The organization is able to maintain a slim IT staff, in
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Oracle Takes JD Edwards Into the Rental Business
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
JD Edwards ERP software has been used in a lot of industries over the decades, including the manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, retail, and media industries. This month, JDE owner Oracle took the venerable brand into a new industry: equipment rental.
The new EnterpriseOne Rental Management offering is a customized version of the ERP system designed for use by companies that rent a variety of gear, including heavy equipment, medical equipment, oil and gas equipment, mining equipment, and construction equipment.
The software manages many aspects of running a rental business, including writing rental contacts and agreements, reservations for future rentals, inventory management,
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Maxava Gooses IFS Replication Performance for HA
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
Maxava is gearing up to give its high availability customers a significant boost in how quickly they can replicate and apply changes to data stored in the IFS. The move from a single-threaded apply process to a multi-threaded apply process should give customers sufficient performance overhead to ensure that IFS replication doesn’t become a bottleneck as IFS data volumes continue to grow.
IBM i shops are being swept up into the big data explosion that’s currently rippling across our world and our data centers. Today they’re generating, processing, storing, and reporting on much larger volumes than they did just a
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Profound Reveals Flexible Code Generator for RPG and PHP
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
One of the toughest parts of beginning an application modernization initiative is just knowing where to start. To give IBM i developers a head start, Profound Logic last week officially unveiled JumpStart, a new code generator that outputs basic RPG and PHP programs, complete with a modern Web or mobile interface. But unlike other code generators, the company says JumpStart gives you full control over how the resulting code looks.
JumpStart is the latest addition to ProfoundUI, the company’s tool for creating modern user interfaces using RPG Open Access technology. The company decided to build JumpStart after several clients asked
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Boost Your IBM i Security by Tracking Config Changes
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
One of the most important aspects of IBM i security is having the right configuration. But configurations rarely stay static, and as they change, so does your level of security protection. Kisco Information Systems last week launched a new tool called iSecMap that helps IBM i shops map how configurations change over time and how they might have opened up security problems along the way.
The IBM i server has a great reputation as a very secure platform on which to run your business. However, the server does not ship from the factory with a strong security turned on by
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ShowCase 10 Gets a Little Help from Friends
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
HelpSystems last week issued a new release of ShowCase, the suite of business intelligence tools that it acquired last year from IBM. With ShowCase 10, HelpSystems borrowed the user interfaces from its SEQUEL product line, which gives ShowCase customers spiffier features like drill downs and pivot tables. ShowCase also got a little help from another sister company for report distribution and scheduling.
HelpSystems’ April 2013 transaction with IBM, you will recall, netted three major products, all of which run on Windows but are almost exclusively used by IBM i customers. These included Query, which allows users to generate
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HiT Hooks HANA to Other Databases with DBMoto
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
You can do a lot with SAP HANA sitting all by itself, including running transactional and analytical applications on the same set of data, which is a pretty neat trick. But in the real world, most SAP HANA customers need a way to move data in and out of HANA as quickly as possible. That’s where the latest release of HiT Software‘s DBMoto software comes in.
Last week HiT Software, which is a subsidiary of BackOffice Associates, announced that the latest release of its DBMoto ETL tool has been certified to integrate with SAP HANA. That means HANA
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CNX Goes Native with Mobile Framework
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
CNX is gearing up to release a native application for smartphones and tablets with the next release of its application development framework for IBM i customers.
With the launch of Valence 4.1, which is slated to become available in mid-November, CNX will, for the first time, offer its mobile portal as a native smartphone app. The company will be targeting iOS first, to be followed by Android support in 2015.
“The big news is that we’re introducing a native iOS portal app for accessing the IBM i server instance,” says Robert Swanson, a senior partner with CNX. “The new native
-
SoCal Water District Taps Bytware for Server Monitoring
November 18, 2014 Alex Woodie
The extreme drought that has engulfed California is forcing everybody to conserve. For citizens, that means using less water and (the horror!) installing artificial turf. Faced with lower revenues, local water districts have also tightened their belts.
Coachella Valley Water District provides water to people through 2,000 miles of piping covering a 1,000-square-mile area near Palm Springs, one of the driest places on earth. Conservation of precious resources like water is a way of life there.
At the CVWD, conservation of IT resources is also a way of life. The organization is able to maintain a slim IT staff, in