• Six IBM i Predictions for 2014

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Hello, and welcome to 2014! The new year began for the IBM i community in just about the same place it began 2013: With a slightly smaller customer base running systems that are just a little bit older. But do not despair! If owning the world’s most stable and predictable business computer doesn’t send you into a fit of rapturous joy, then perhaps these predictions on IBM i products and technologies for the coming year will. Prediction No. 1: IBM Delivers ‘Power’ Boost, World Shrugs It’s not like we had to go out on a limb for this, seeing as

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• Medical Supply Firm Protects Data with Vault400

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  A.A. Laquis Limited, a medical supply distributor in the Caribbean, has selected the Vault400 offering from United Computer Group to protect its critical IBM i server, the vendor announced last month. With 150,000 square feet of distribution space in Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, and Jamaica and more than 200 employees, A.A. Laquis Limited is the biggest supplier of medical supplies and home healthcare supplies in the Caribbean. The privately held company uses an IBM i server equipped with ERP software from VAI to automate its back-office operations. The distributor selected Vault400 after looking at the other alternatives available on the

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• Symtrax Debuts Compleo Print Manager

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Printing a document from within an ERP application can sometimes be a challenge. With a new solution from Symtrax called Compleo Print Manager, users can control printing from ERP systems within the comfort of a Web-based interface. Symtrax’s new Print Manager offering is designed to be a secure and central repository for configuring and controlling printers within an ERP landscape. The software utilizes existing Windows print drivers to reduce the chances that the print drivers are incompatible with a particular ERP product. In addition to configuring printers, the software helps to optimize printer options, thereby enabling it to initiate printing

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• Heartland Taps Help/Systems for IBM i Job Scheduling

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Job scheduling is one of those things that you may not pay a lot of attention to. For the folks at Heartland Financial, keeping track of IBM i and Windows jobs manually worked just find–right up to the day it didn’t. And that’s when it brought in Help/Systems and its Robot/SCHEDULER to automate the situation. Heartland Financial USA is a $5.7 billion multi-bank holding company providing banking, mortgage, wealth management, brokerage, and insurance services to clients in the Midwest and the West. The publicly traded company is considered one of the top 100 bank holding companies in the US. An

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• Infor Goes In-Country with M3 Accelerators

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Infor in December rolled out a pair of country-specific Implementation Accelerators for its M3 product line that will speed implementation of the ERP suite in the US and the UK. According to Infor, each Implementation Accelerator Country Version is designed to enable the rapid deployment of the Infor M3 application in a specific geography–in this case, the US or the UK. The offerings are designed to make it easier to adhere to the specific statutory regulations and reporting requirements for daily business transactions and operations. “Typically, an M3 customer will operate across international borders,” said John Chandler, Infor’s senior product

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• Bone Up on Free-Form RPG with developerWorks

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The new free-form RPG specs delivered with IBM i 7.1 TR7 are the most exciting thing to happen to the language since RPG Open Access was unveiled four years ago. Last week, IBM published a developerWorks guide on how to program within the new free-form method. Free-form RPG is intended to move the language away from its fixed-format roots and put it on par with other commonly used languages, such as Visual Basic, Java, and PHP. The idea is to make RPG more enticing to learn, and introduce the language to a new generation of programmers. IBM software engineers Scott

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• CIOs At Risk of Becoming Irrelevant on Technology Decisions, Logicalis Survey Says

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  A survey conducted last year by Logicails indicates that CIOs are losing clout in the board room when it comes to technology decisions. Unless they do something, CIOs and other tech leaders risk being overshadowed by line of business managers. According to the survey conducted by the managed service provider (MSP), 60 percent of CIOs agree that line-of-business managers will gain sway on technology purchases over the next three to five years. It’s an ongoing issue facing technology leaders and is being driven in large part by the consumerization of technology and the availability of increasingly sophisticated Web-based services. To

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• Forgotten Password Problem Solved, Kisco Says

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Help desk personnel will be free to pursue more fulfilling activities as a result of Kisco Information Systems‘ latest software, iResetMe. Unveiled last week, the new product allows IBM i users to reset their own passwords from a secure Web connection, thereby alleviating help desks from the burden of resetting forgotten user passwords. Password resets are the single most common activity at IT help desks in the Western World. According to Gartner, 20 to 50 percent of calls to the help desk are for password resets, and each reset cost from $14 to $28. Those figures are from 2003,

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• GoAnywhere: Linoma’s Anti-Dropbox

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard not to like Dropbox. You simply drag your files to the pretty blue icon on your desktop and voila! They’re instantly accessible from multiple devices–in fact, any Web browser in the world! The only problem: Dropbox isn’t that secure and has a history of security problems. For a business that takes security seriously, a proper managed file transfer (MFT) solution is a much better choice for moving files. Last week, MFT vendor Linoma Software updated its GoAnywhere product to give it some of the ease-of-use features that Dropbox is known for. It’s not that Dropbox can’t be secure.

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• Set Your RPG Apps Free with ODF, looksoftware Says

  January 14, 2014 Alex Woodie

  RPG developers will be able to create new Web-based GUIs using IBM‘s Rational Open Access: RPG Edition (ROA) technology without touching a lick of DDS thanks to the new Open Display File (ODF) technology unveiled last month by looksoftware. The new technology, which will become available later this month, is standards-based, and essentially takes the development in ROA to the next level, the company says. Since IBM unveiled the ROA technology about four years ago, it has seen some use. Like any new technology, it has taken a while for the IBM i faithful to consider it a

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