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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It’s Time For Security Administrator Roles At IBM i Shops, Skyview Says
September 16, 2013 Alex Woodie
It’s time for system administrators to give up security-related tasks and hand them over to a dedicated security administrators in IBM i shops, says Skyview Partners. While the jack-of-all trades approach has succeeded in keeping costs down, the risks of losing data are becoming too great to rely on the skills of a generalist, says the company, which just published a new guide describing the role of an IBM i security administrator.
“Security administration can no longer be lost in the list of things that a system administrator is supposed to do on a regular basis,” says Skyview president
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IBM Data Studio Deserves a Closer Look
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
Good developers are always on the hunt for new tools that allow them to accomplish their everyday tasks faster, cheaper, or better. For IBM i developers who like to stay within the comfy confines of Eclipse, there’s a little-known database management utility called IBM Data Studio that could become a go-to tool, particularly when it comes to graphically debugging SQL and Java stored procedures on the IBM i server.
IBM Data Studio is a free graphical development tool based on Eclipse that previously went by a couple of names, including IBM DB2 Developers Workbench and IBM DB2 Development Center. The
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Vision Touts Cloud Readiness of MIMIX DR
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
MIMIX DR is ready to start protecting IBM i customers from the cloud. That’s the message coming from Vision Solutions, which is ramping up its marketing machine in the hopes of sparking cloud sales of the remote journaling-based disaster recovery (DR) solution for itself, and its managed service provider (MSP) partners, too.
MIMIX DR is a new piece of DR software that Vision unveiled in May. The software is nearly identical to the full MIMIX product that has been synonymous with high availability since the days of the AS/400, except for the lack of an automated failover process
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RTC Now Lets You Simulate IBM i Dependency Builds on Windows
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
IBM i and z/OS shops that use IBM‘s Rational Team Concert (RTC) software to manage their development processes will get a new “simulation mode” that allows time-saving dependency builds to run on any platform, including Windows. The new feature is included in the latest release of RTC, version 4.0.4, which shipped in late August.
The new functionality will allow users to run a simulated dependency build for IBM i and z/OS applications on any platform, including Windows, IBM says. “This makes it possible to create all the dependency metadata [build maps and so on] of a build without running
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Linoma Adds Clustering, Disk Throttling to MFT Products
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
Organizations that have no tolerance for downtime with their file transfer activities may want to take a look at the latest release of Linoma Software‘s GoAnywhere Director software, which gains support for clustering. The company also issued a new release of its GoAnywhere Services software that allows administrators to limit how much storage and network bandwidth users of the product can consume.
Support for “active-active” clustering in version 4.5 puts another feather in the cap of GoAnyhere Director, the most feature-rich member of Linoma’s MFT suite. With this capability, multiple installations of GoAnywhere Director can work together to execute
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BlueWare CEO Arrested in Alleged Kickback Scheme
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
The CEO of BlueWare, a developer of IBM i-based healthcare management applications, was arrested in Florida last month for her alleged role in a kickback scheme with an elected official and a lobbyist, who were also arrested. The CEO, Rose Harr, posted bail and denies all the charges.
Harr is accused of funneling money into the 2012 re-election campaign of Mitch Needelman, who was then the Brevard County Clerk of Court, in exchange for Needelman’s assistance in arranging for BlueWare to receive an $8.5 million contract from the county to scan a gymnasium full of paper documents into digital records.
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IBM Revs Cloud-Based Social Business Suite
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
IBM has issued a new release of SmartCloud for Social Business (SC4SB), a collection of cloud-based utilities that allow users to collaborate online via email, instant messaging, file sharing, and more.
SC4SB is an IBM-hosted offering that provides users with email, calendar, instant messaging file sharing, forums, and Web meeting functionality from the comfort of a Web browser or an IBM Notes client. IBM rolled out the SC4SB offerings (which previously went by the name LotusLive) in January 2012.
IBM sells various bundles and stand-alone services as part of the SC4SB suite. These bundles include: the entry-level SmartCloud Connections
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Qualcomm Sells Omnitracs for $800 Million
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
Qualcomm last month sold Omnitracs, its division that develops truck- and trailer-tracking technology that was often integrated with carriers’ dispatching applications running on IBM i servers, to a private equity group for $800 million.
Long before CDMA or the Snapdragon processors were a gleam in Irwin Jacobs’ eye, Qualcomm was–if you can believe it–a mainstay in the rough and tumble world of interstate trucking.
The tale starts in the glorious year of 1988, when the San Diego, California, company started developing the Omnitracs systems that would combine cellular, satellite, and IBM midrange technology to track and monitor trucks and trailers
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Infor Delivers Better ERP Hooks Into Salesforce.com
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
Infor customers can now feed data from multiple, disparate ERP systems or even multiple divisions of the company into their Salesforce.com implementation using its latest Inforce connector, the company announced in August.
Inforce is a collection of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that automatically populate data from Infor’s back-end ERP and financial systems into the front-end Salesforce.com CRM offering. The first Inforce offering for sales professional debuted in early 2012, and was followed up with two more, for marketing and customer service disciplines.
Inforce’s new multi-ERP and multi-company capabilities will enable larger organizations to take advantage of the solution.
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User Defined Dashboards Now Shipping from mrc
September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie
Earlier this year, mrc announced a feature of its m-Power development environment called user defined dashboards that puts more power in the hands of users. The product, it turns out, wasn’t quite fully baked. But now, we’re told, it’s ready to roll.
User defined dashboards are designed to enable users to pick and choose what graphical elements (such as charts, graphs, and tables) they will see on their dashboards and also where they are placed on the screen. After selecting the screen elements required for, say, a sales dashboard, the users save their work. The users can then access the