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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Zend Patches High-Risk Security Flaw in PHP
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Zend Technology last week issued emergency hotfixes for the latest PHP runtimes for IBM i, Windows, and Linux to fix a high-risk security vulnerability in PHP that could enable an attacker to execute arbitrary code on affected systems.
Zend on Thursday announced the immediate availability of Zend Server 6.3 Hotfix 1. The hotfix implements a new release of the PHP language, version 5.5.9, and thereby patches a security flaw in its Zend Server PHP runtimes for IBM i, Windows, and Linux platforms. There is no hotfix for the Zend version 6.3 runtime for Mac OS X.
The patch addresses the
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m-Power Gets All Gussied Up with New Charts, Graphs
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
A great tennis player from Las Vegas once proclaimed, “Image is everything.” While hardcore IBM i types weaned on sparsely colored 5250 screens may disagree, the folks at mrc have embraced good looks as a strategic advantage. Recently, the Chicago company outfitted its IBM i Web app dev tool, m-Power, with an array of new charts and graphs that it plainly admits are “beautiful.”
Topping the best-dressed list in m-Power’s graphs and chart lineups are several new chart types, including interactive funnel charts, cylinder charts, and “zoom line” charts. The charts are included with a subscription to m-Power, and are
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Krengel Rejiggers Mailing Automation Lineup
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Krengel Technology last month introduced DocuTransfer, the new name for its suite of document and mailing automation software for Windows. Formerly called DocuMailer, the new DocuTransfer suite allows users to pick and choose exactly which options and capabilities they need to support their mailing operations.
Instead of one DocuMailer product, Krengel Tech now offers a family of document management and mailing automation solutions under the DocuTransfer banner. Customers gets started by selecting one of the core DocuTransfer products–Pro or Lite.
Both DocuTransfer Pro and Lite offer core mailing automation features, such as CASS and NCOA address validation, PAVE presorting, various
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RJS Bolsters Report-Delivery Tool
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
RJS Software Systems last week announced that the latest release of its DeliverNow report-delivery tool has passed all QA tests and is ready for adoption by IBM i customers.
DeliverNow is a Windows-based product that automates the capture and delivery of reports over the network. The software can take reports generated from IBM i spool files (or the output of Windows, Linux, or AIX applications), convert them into PDF (or RTF, HTML, or Excel) formats, and then distribute them via email, fax, FTP, or posted to a document management Web portal.
Version 1.2 of the product brings a series of
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Infor Adds Industry-Specific Functionality to M3
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Infor last week launched a new release of its Infor M3 ERP software. Version 13.2 brings enhancements in six industry verticals, including food and beverage, clothing, and equipment dealers, among others.
When we last visited M3, Infor explained to IT Jungle how M3 version 13.1 would be the last big release of the ERP suite for some time, that Infor was going to slow things and simultaneously become more agile in an attempt to keep new capabilities within reach of users on older M3 release. It’s not unlike the Tech Refresh (TR) approach that IBM adopted for the IBM i
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SAP HANA: Just a Sidecar to IBM i, For Now
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
It’s been about three years since SAP unveiled HANA to the world. And while the in-memory database platform currently only runs on X64 commodity hardware and not IBM‘s Power processor, SAP’s extensive IBM i customer base is starting to explore ways that HANA might fit into an SAP implementations running on Power Systems and IBM i.
Ron Schmerbauch, IBM’s technical lead for SAP on IBM i implementation, recently wrote about the possible integration options between IBM i and HANA. Currently, there are only two ways that HANA and IBM i can play together, Schmerbauch says: HANA as an analytical
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Alaska Telecom Ditches Tape for LaserVault UBD
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Copper Valley Telecom, a small telephone company that serves the city of Valdez, Alaska, has left behind the hassles of tape and embraced the simplicity of disk-to-disk backups. Since adopting the LaserVault Universal Backup Device (UBD) to backup its production IBM i server, the company is enjoying significantly faster and more automated backups. And thanks to LaserVault UBD’s Web interface, IT staffers no longer fumble around with tapes when the company needs to build a test environment.
Prior to implementing the LaserVault UBD, Copper Valley used a 24-slot IBM tape library to back up the data stored on its IBM
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Google’s New Login Is ‘Slick,’ But Will It Fly in the Enterprise?
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Google last month acquired SlickLogin, an Israeli security startup that developed an innovative login process that authenticates individuals by using a smartphone to capture sound waves generated by a requesting app. The technology has the potential to eliminate reliance on passwords, which everybody can agree is a good thing. But is the technology ready for primetime? Security expert Patrick Townsend chimes in.
SlickLogin debuted just six months ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco. Evidentially, the technology (born of the Israeli Defense Force’s elite cyber security unit) made such an impact on the Google folks down the
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Halcyon Gives IBM i Shops an Edge in MQ Management
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Halcyon Software last week rolled out MQ Manager, a new piece of software designed to help IBM i shops manage their IBM WebSphere MQ environments. The new product sports a Web-based user interface, and is designed to alert administrators to any potential problems that might pop up in their production MQ systems.
Originally launched 23 years ago as MQ Series, IBM’s message queuing technology is the digital backbone for critical IT systems at big companies around the world. WebSphere MQ (as it was renamed in 2002) provides guaranteed one-time, asynchronous delivery of ASCI and EBCDIC messages across a variety of
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IBM Aims to Smooth DevOps with RTC Update
March 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
IBM last week shipped a new release of its Rational Team Concert (RTC) product that should help to streamline and automate the fast pace of today’s DevOps environments–in particular those aiming for continuous delivery. Among the IBM i-functionality, improvements in the product’s dependency build and promotion capabilities top the list. In addition to RTC 4.06, Big Blue also gave us new releases of Rational Requirements Composer and Rational Quality Manager products.
RTC is an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool launched more than five years ago that allows teams of developers to work together more efficiently. The product offers source code