The importance of software testing was made painfully obvious to Bill Gates a couple of weeks ago. During his keynote at the consumer electronics show, the Microsoft chairman’s Media Center PC crashed during a demo, and other Microsoft executives had similar problems. While most midrange programmers would bristle at any comparison of Microsoft’s wares to their own, the iSeries world still has a thing or two to learn about good testing procedures, according to a report commissioned by testing tool vendor Original Software Group.

In October 2004, Original Software commissioned an independent study to determine how iSeries shops test

In an ideal world, there would be no need to grant All Object (ALLOBJ) privileges on your OS/400 server. Everybody would be granted just enough access to do their jobs, and no more. Of course, we live in an imperfect world, and IT administrators, programmers, and even outside auditors often need special authorities, like ALLOBJ, to do their jobs. Thanks to a new program called AuthorityBroker, launched by PowerTech Group last week, the use of special authorities can be minimized and monitored.

Users with special authorities can do quite a bit of damage to an OS/400 server. The big one

Marketing people like to talk about how the ease-of-use and low total-cost-of-ownership of the iSeries can help users concentrate on the business at hand instead of worrying about information technology. Well, the folks up at adidas-Solomon Canada are actually living this lean IT dream. A new OS/400 server, a handful of Integrated xSeries Servers, and a new Web application have enabled the sporting goods manufacturer to eliminate Wintel server sprawl and expand customer service to the Internet, while keeping costs low at the same time.

With 250 employees and $230 million (Canadian) in annual revenues, adidas-Salomon is the biggest sports

New Generation Software launched new software this month for developing and serving graphical “dashboard” views that allow people to quickly absorb data pulled from iSeries servers. The new product, aptly called the Business Performance Dashboard, is based on the company’s flagship NGS-IQ business intelligence software, and enables executives and other decision-makers to view key performance indicators and other performance data in colorful and interactive Flash presentations.

Instead of reading page after page of static reports, executives can get to the heart of the matter much more quickly with the Business Performance Dashboard, says Bernard Gough, president and CEO of New