It’s 7 p.m., and all your users are supposed to be logged off the system, but do you know where your security officer is? While you trust your security officer to hold the keys to the i5/OS kingdom, today’s regulatory environment simply doesn’t permit all-powerful users to traverse corporate IT systems unseen and unmonitored. A new release of PowerTech Group‘s AuthorityBroker gives i5/OS shops the capability to monitor the monitors, and get back into the good graces of the auditors.

AuthorityBroker helps i5/OS and OS/400 shops lessen the need for users to run with profiles granting them special authorities,

Long implementation timeframes have plagued portal projects since this technology became widely available. That’s not to say that companies are unable to successfully deploy portals. IBM and other portal software companies have documented numerous achievements. However, portals have yet to gain widespread acceptance, and the burden of prolonged implementation has been a factor. Some of that responsibility rests with the complexity of the software and some of it rests on companies’ failure to have a clear business plan.

IBM’s WebSphere Portal product development group is currently shining the light on ease of implementation, knowing that this is the origin of

Companies that run multiple types of servers are faced with special challenges when it comes to collecting log data, normalizing the information, and generating audit reports. Auditing is bad enough with a single server, but the difficulties are compounded when the data resides across disparate systems. Security software vendor Bsafe Information Systems has addressed this challenge with Bsafe Enterprise Security version 5.5, which enables companies to run audit reports across i5/OS, Linux, mainframe, and Windows servers from a single screen.

There are some pretty big changes coming to Bsafe Enterprise Security. This product, which was introduced about two years ago

There’s a lot of stuff sitting in your logs that auditors would like to know about. But sometimes it can be a pain to get to them, and even more of a pain to store them. i5/OS systems management tool developer CCSS is addressing this market need with a new release of QMessage Monitor that facilitates easy archiving, removal and printing of the message history. The new release also provides better monitoring of FTP activity, among other features.

QMessage Monitor is a message management solution for single- and multi-site OS/400 and i5/OS implementations. The software constantly watches a variety of

Curl unfurled its second act at the Web 2.0 conference last week in San Francisco. The New England scripting language developer–which was once touted by AMR Research‘s Bruce Richardson as developing suitable “preservation” technology for the AS/400–is rebranding its language as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform for service oriented architecture (SOA) interfaces.

Curl was originally created at MIT as a class project for the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Twelve students and scientists involved in the project, led by computer scientist Stephen Ward, Michael Dertouzos (the late director of the MIT computer science lab), and

Lawson Software announced five new M3 customers last week, including European companies Enia Carpet Group, Bygma, Johannes Fog, and Plus Orthopedics, and Guatemala-based Koramsa. The new contracts were signed during the company’s third quarter, which ended February 28.

Enia Carpet Group is a €190 million (about $250 million) Swiss manufacturer of flooring materials, including paper, steel, textile, foil, and high-quality residential and commercial carpeting. The company will replace an existing ERP system with M3, a Java-based ERP system that is traditionally, but not always, run on an IBM iSeries server. Enia’s initial plans call for installing M3 at its facilities

Magic Software last week unveiled a special edition of its iBOLT integration software designed to work specifically with SAP‘s R/3 and mySAP ERP suite.

Magic broke iBOLT off from its flagship eDeveloper IDE in 2003 and packaged it as a wizard-driven enterprise application integration suite that helps customers integrate their business applications using an array of the latest standards and techniques, including Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA). The software, which includes development, runtime, and monitoring components, is very extensible and supports an array of integration types, including workflow and composite functionality, B2B and application-to-application (EDI) functionality, and

The city of Jupiter, Florida, has deployed MobileHWY‘s PC-based field automation solution, called MobileHWY INSPECTOR, to provide remote, offline access to its OS/400-based building permit and inspection software from Sungard/HTE, the software vendor announced last week.

Jupiter, like many communities in Florida, is dealing with big changes in the face of unprecedented population growth. With the population in unincorporated Jupiter projected to increase 33 percent by 2010, the town’s building department has its work cut out for it if it hopes to maintain the cozy small-town feel.

While the new software from MobileHWY won’t affect supply and demand,

i5/OS trucking software developer Innovative Computing recently announced Scriptor, a new data access and reporting tool that works with Innovative Enterprise Software (IES), the company’s flagship fleet management system for the System i server.

Scriptor was designed to provide IES users with quick access to important information such as load, billing, and equipment information. The software also brings predefined reports providing IES users with key performance indicators (KPI) measuring equipment productivity and utilization, customer service, and revenue analysis, among other performance measurements.

Innovative hopes that, by making this information available from a graphical interface navigated with a mouse as opposed

Help/Systems last week rolled out an update to Robot/SCHEDULE version 10 that allows it to fully leverage the new capabilities in the latest release of Robot/NETWORK, its cross-product systems automation solution for organizations with multiple System i servers.

Robot/SCHEDULE is Help/Systems job scheduler for i5/OS and OS/400 systems. In late 2006, the company rolled out Robot/SCHEDULE 10.0, which introduced a new Java-based management console, called the Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer, which provided streamlined access to information about jobs and their schedules. Then, earlier this month, the company launched version 10 of Robot/NETWORK, which also brought a new Java-based Explorer interface.

While the