Steve Pitcher has a major beef with IBM. No, it’s not about the confusing naming schemes that Big Blue has cooked up for his beloved IBM i platform (that’s just a minor beef). The big one has to do with the fact that some key IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software doesn’t run on the IBM i platform. But instead of quietly stewing about it, Pitcher has set out to change things, and judging from his experience at last week’s Lotusphere conference, he’s having success.

In his day job, Pitcher is the enterprise systems manager for Scotsburn Dairy Group

Being prepared for a disaster makes good business sense, especially with the recent spate of major disasters occurring recently in the United States. For IBM i shops, disaster preparedness requires a little extra planning and capability. One company that’s growing its specialized IBM i disaster recovery (DR) service business is TECA Data Safe, which provides everything a company needs to recover its IBM i environment, including servers, bandwidth, and–most importantly–experienced staff.

TECA Data Safe first began providing DR in the mid-2000s as a value-added service for customers who purchased System i servers from its sister companies, VIS of Minnesota

You can’t beat free. Earlier this month, Raz-Lee Security announced that it’s giving away copies of its IBM i antivirus software, which is based on the open source ClamAV engine. The free version doesn’t include some of the more advanced features that are available in the enterprise version of the software, but it will help IBM i shops detect and eliminate Windows malware that can infect and be distributed via the Integrated File System (IFS).

The IBM i OS is rightfully hailed as one of the most secure, commercially available operating systems ever created. Properly configured, the OS will thwart

Symtrax last week unveiled Compleo Suite 5, a major new version of its line of output management software for IBM i and other platforms. With version 5, Symtrax has added a Web-based interface for the first time, providing an alternative to its Windows-based client. Better backups of critical documents, workflow capabilities, and new support for inputting additional document types round out this release.

Compleo is a suite of output management tools that is well-established in the IBM i community. The software offers a range of document-related capabilities, the biggest being the conversion and distribution of spool files from IBM i

It will be easier to automatically send emails from your IBM i applications using the latest release of KeyesMail, an IBM i-based email package developed by Computer Keyes. With KeyesMail version 9, the Woodway, Washington, company has rewritten the APIs to make them easier to use.

KeyesMail is a full function email application that runs natively on the IBM i server. The software includes a SMTP- and POP3-compliant email server, a green-screen text editor for writing and viewing email on IBM i terminal, the capability to create email templates, a set of APIs, for automatically sending email from IBM

iSam Blue, a data protection company specializing in the backup and recovery field, has added a virtual backup storage solution to its repertoire of products and services. The addition is a result of partnership with Tributary Systems makers of Storage Director, a virtual tape library software product that consolidates tape libraries and accelerates backups in multi-server, multi-platform environments.

Robert Seal, CEO at iSam Blue, says he first heard about Storage Director at the COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition.

“I realized that this is a backup solution that many IBM i users need,” Seal said in a telephone interview

Integrated Print Solutions of Texas has acquired all the rights to OnePrint, a print protocol converter that it’s distributed for the last 14 years, from its former business partner LogNet Systems of Israel.

OnePrint is a Windows-based print protocol converter that enables customers to print documents from IBM i and mainframe servers on standard, inexpensive printers, and eliminates the need for customers to purchase or maintain expensive AFP and IPDS printers from IBM.

The software works by converting the high-end AFP and IPDS output from IBM servers into standard printer data streams–including Printer Control Language (PCL) and PostScript, as well

Stallergenes, the second largest maker of allergy medicine in Europe, has tapped Magic Software and its iBOLT software to integrate a Lawson M3-based purchasing system running on an IBM i server into its SAP financial system, the software company announced last week.

Stallergenes is a biopharmaceutical company based in France that is a leader in the manufacture of sublingual immunotherapy medicines for allergic respiratory diseases, such as rhinoconjunctivitis and allergic asthma. The company markets its Stalair-branded products in 50 countries across the world, and recorded €216 million in revenues for 2010.

Stallergenes runs a mix of various computer systems to

RJS Software Systems, which has been on a product integration kick of late, last week announced that a new release of its Windows-based WebDocs document management and routing software can now be used directly with WebForms, its online forms offering, resulting in heightened usability.

Prior to the release of WebDocs–Windows Edition version 1.4, RJS customers who were also running WebForms had no obvious, out-of-the-box way to hook the two products together. This was unfortunate for RJS customers, as the two products offer complementary capabilities in the area of capturing data from people via online forms (WebForms) and managing and

T.L. Ashford & Associates last week unveiled a new overlay utility for Barcode400, its IBM i forms and barcode labeling software. The new utility is much easier to use and will make Barcode400 users more productive, the company says.

Barcode400 is an electronic forms and labeling package that supports the generation of all types of barcodes and radio frequency identification (RFID)-encoded tags, including compliance labels. The software runs natively on the IBM i server and integrates with existing RPG, COBOL, and CL applications without any programming, the company says. The software outputs labels in Printer Control Language (PCL) and AFP