• IBM i Horror Story With A Happy Ending

  December 7, 2015 Dan Burger

  Users of IBM i and its predecessors have had their share of horror stories. Those on any other business computing platform can say the same. However, I think it’s fair to say the IBM midrange platform is no worse than any other and is better than its competition in many ways. But that doesn’t make it a fairy tale. Evidence of this is the IBM Entitled Systems Support. Also known as the portal to hell. For just about anyone who has tried to order a product or a product upgrade from IBM, this is a horror story. The needle on

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• IBM Patches Pair of Security Flaws in iAccess for Windows 7.1

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month revealed the presence of a pair of security vulnerabilities in iAccess for Windows 7.1, including one that could allow a local cybercriminal to take control of the Windows PC running the iAccess software, and another that could be used to launch a denial of service attack. Big Blue patched both flaws with a PTF. IBM provided some details of the security flaws with a Security Bulletin N1020996 published November 18, which is the same day it released PTF number SI57907 to fix the flaws in iAccess for Windows 7.1. The buffer overflow flaw that was given the

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• Urgent Need for Application Modernization Seen at the Federal Level

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Security breaches. Downtime. Poor performance. These are some of the problems federal IT managers expect to encounter if they continue to run legacy applications as they now exist, according to a recent study from MeriTalk. But instead of ditching the old applications and writing new ones from scratch, MeriTalk advocates a selective modernization approach that blends new and old. MeriTalk, a public-private partnership that addresses IT issues in the federal government, recently tackled the topic of legacy modernization with a report titled “Future Ready Applications: The Modern Legacy.” The November 18 study involved responses from 150 federal IT managers,

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• Remain Taps JIRA to Heighten Change Management Collaboration

  December 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  Controlling the chaos of collaboration from an application development perspective has proved to be a valuable asset for many IBM midrange customers. Better code, with the bugs worked out before it goes into production, saves time and money compared to debugging and redesigning after the fact. The value goes beyond writing code because collaboration applies to many business oriented teams and numerous end users who are effected sometimes for the better and other times for the worse. Project tracking comes in many flavors, so Remain Software is integrating its application lifecycle management tool, TD/OMS, with multiple popular options. Its latest

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• Quadrant Doubles Down on Simplicity with Formtastic 10

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Complexity is a killer in this brave new electronic world of ours. If your product or service is hard to use, don’t expect the masses to come knocking at your door. That ethos of simplicity echoes across all industries and businesses, and it’s the driving factor in a major new version of Quadrant Software‘s Formtastic output management software for IBM i. Quadrant made two important changes to grease the wheels of simplicity with Formtastic 10, the first major new version of the product in years. First, it overhauled the Windows-based design tool that Formtastic customers use to create and

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• HATS Now Hooked Into BlueMix Cloud

  December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops adopting the latest release of IBM‘s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) product will be able to create and run their modernized interfaces on BlueMix, Big Blue’s cloud service. Support for the latest Rational development tools and improved security round out HATS 9.5, which shipped in November. When it comes to application modernization, IBM i shops have a number of options available to them. Many of those modernization tools come from third-party vendors that you have read about in past issues of The Four Hundred and the discontinued Four Hundred Stuff, which included more than 3,000

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• ERP Upgrades: Love ‘Em or Leave ‘Em?

  November 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  What is the value of an ERP system? At most companies that use them, the ERP suite is critical to daily functioning. Without a centralized place to run things like accounts payable and general ledger, the company simply couldn’t operate. But that line of reasoning does not appear to hold true when it comes to ERP upgrades, which companies are increasingly choosing not to perform. A recent survey from Rimini Street shed some light on the situation surrounding ERP upgrades, specifically for Oracle customers. In its second-annual survey of Oracle customers around world, Rimini (which is a provider third-party maintenance

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• Townsend Security Turns Over a New LEEF

  November 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Townsend Security‘s Alliance LogAgent software now speaks Log Event Extended Format (LEEF), a data format used by IBM‘s QRadar security information and event monitoring (SIEM) software. The two companies’ integration and development work will dramatically reduce the time spent training QRadar to understand security events happening on IBM i, says Townsend Security founder and CEO Patrick Townsend. Practically every SIEM product on the planet supports the industry standard Syslog format. Townsend’s software can convert IBM i event data, such as events logged to the QAUDJRN, into the Syslog format so it can be consumed by 35 or so

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• LANSA Shows Off Responsive Design Capabilities

  November 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  Designing Web pages that display on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone are no longer considered in terms of individual development efforts. That eats up too much time and often becomes an application maintenance nightmare. One development effort that results in user interfaces that correctly display regardless of the device is the new normal. Making the build process quick and the performance fast is the goal everyone is aiming for. LANSA is the latest option for making this happen. The process of building applications with interfaces that change depending on where they’re presented–desktop, laptop, tablet, or

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• IBM i Mobile Apps Made Easy

  November 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  As the number of IBM midrange shops building mobile applications grows, the ideas about features and functionality expands. Rising to the top of that list for many companies is the usefulness of a bar code scanner in combination with IBM i-based applications. It’s a demand that BCD Software has noticed and it led to creation of Presto Mobile, an app for accessing modernized green screens from iPhones and iPads. Accessibility to IBM i data is a basic requirement, but the added capability of using the built-in camera as a bar code scanner is the driving force behind Presto Mobile, according

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