• Ricoh Debuts New Multifunction Color Laser Printer

  October 16, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Ricoh Americas recently launched a new color multifunction printer, the Aficio MP C2000. Designed to support the document workflow needs of office workers, the C2000 laser printer provides a full range of paper handling features and prints at the rate of 20 pages per minute, for a price around $10,000. As the New Jersey subsidiary of Ricoh, the Japanese electronics giant that bought IBM’s printing division earlier this year for $725 million, Ricoh is suddenly front and center at many iSeries and System i shops these days. When it comes time to buy new workgroup or production printers, Ricoh,

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• Gas Barbeque Distributor Upgrades its Infor ERP

  October 16, 2007 Alex Woodie

  AEI Corp., a Southern California distributor of propane and natural gas grills, lights, and heaters, has tapped i5/OS ERP juggernaut Infor to upgrade its aging OS/400-based DMAS ERP system to the more modern i5/OS-based ERP A+ application, the former Daly.Commerce product. Since it started selling its original Charmglow Gas Grill in 1966, AEI has been selling a variety of gas grills and accessories to wholesalers and retailers in the western states, Mexico, and Europe. About 20 years ago, the company installed DMAS, one of the original distribution packages developed for the S/36, which AEI relied on to keep track of

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• looksoftware’s Modernization Suite Resembling a Full IDE

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  For looksoftware‘s customers, modernization of existing applications through the creation of composite programs is usually the goal. Leave it to the IBM‘s and Microsoft‘s of the world to build fully integrated development environments (IDEs) for writing new applications from scratch, the thinking goes. But with the upcoming release of version 9 of look’s modernization suite early next year, developers will find more powerful capabilities typically associated with full-blown IDEs. The task of modernizing legacy enterprise applications is not an easy one. If all it required was replacing green screens with pretty graphical interfaces, it would be a

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• Pat Townsend Normalizes i5/OS Log Data for Security Analyses

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  There are many advantages to using a System i server to run business applications, including high degrees of security, scalability, and reliability. But there are also disadvantages to the proprietary platform, such as the fact that its security log data is incompatible with industry standard formats used by Windows, Unix, and Linux machines, which poses a challenge to security event correlation. Last week, i5/OS software vendor Patrick Townsend & Associates launched a new product, called the Alliance LogAgent, that transforms i5/OS log data into the industry standard “syslog” format. It used to be that nobody paid much attention to the

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• Linoma Boosts Surveyor/400’s SQL Functionality

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  With SQL making such deep inroads into the System i platform as a data access language, programmers can use every little bit of help to make writing and managing SQL easier. To that end, Linoma Software recently introduced a new version of its multi-function Surveyor/400 database utility that provides users with more powerful SQL-generating capabilities, including new wizards that automate SQL actions, such as joins, new color-coding to make SQL easier to read, and new security functions. Surveyor/400 is a versatile, Java-based, client-server program that enables users to accomplish a range of tasks on the iSeries server, such as viewing

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• PowerTech Updates Compliance Manager

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  System i shops looking for a powerful, System i-based security compliance reporting product may want to check out the new release of Compliance Monitor unveiled by PowerTech Group last week. With the capability to process bigger chunks of security log data from more systems into plain English results that are easier to understand, Version 2.0 promises to be the nontechnical security auditor’s best friend. Debuting as “ComplianceMonitor” in October 2005, Compliance Monitor is designed to help System i shops satisfy the security audit components of regulations like PCI, SOX, and HIPAA. By interrogating the i5/OS QAUDJRN security log and

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• IBM Comments on iSeries Access and Windows Vista

  October 9, 2007 Linda Hirsch

  IBM‘s iSeries Access (now called “System i Access” but still commonly called “Client Access”) added support for Windows Vista in the Windows client in December of 2006. Alex Woodie’s September 18 Four Hundred Stuff article, “Windows Vista Poses Challenges to Emulation Vendors”, listed the various problems and restrictions that System i Access had documented at the time of the article. Since then, the documentation has been updated. Here is the current status of System i Access for Windows on Vista. Alex’s article compared 5250 emulation packages. The PC5250 emulator in System i Access for Windows is fully supported

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• Update on Virtualization Manager’s i5/OS LPAR Capabilities

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Several weeks ago, we ran a story, “IBM Preps Update to Virtualization Manager”, that was critical about the lack of support for the i5/OS operating system’s native virtualization technology, called Logical Partitioning, or LPAR, within the product. As it turns out, we were wrong on some of the technical details when it comes to Virtualization Manager’s support for i5/OS LPAR. You can, indeed, create LPARs with Virtualization Manager. You just can’t deploy them. IBM launched Virtualization Manager about a year ago to give system administrators a single place where they can monitor and control the virtual machines and virtual

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• Raz-Lee Supports SSL in i5/OS Firewall

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security has added support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption in iSecurity Firewall, the firewall component of its iSecurity suite that controls access to OS/400 and i5/OS assets via exit points, object-level security, IP packet filtering, user- and group-level security, and other techniques. Support for SSL encryption will make it easier to incorporate iSecurity into the corporate data center without degrading performance, according to Raz-Lee. Earlier this month, Raz-Lee announced that support for SSL in iSecurity Firewall will bring several advantages, the most important being that users can now adopt specific user-to-port network rules for users of common network

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• Inventive Designers Launches DTM for iSeries Version 3

  October 9, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Inventive Designers recently launched a new release of Data/Text Merge (DTM) for iSeries, version 3. With this release, the OfficeVision/400 replacement gains better interoperability with Scriptura, the Belgium company’s multi-platform document reformatting and routing engine, as well as compatibility with Word 2007 as a front-end interface for designing documents. DTM for iSeries allows users to automate the generation of business correspondence through the use of generalized “skeleton documents” and specific customer information stored in DB2/400 or other i5/OS data sources. The software also allows users to replace the OS/400 commands used by OfficeVision/400 with DTM for iSeries commands, if they

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