• IBM i Database Capabilities Highlight Midrange Dynamics’ Development Activity

  February 28, 2018 Dan Burger

  Despite the gravitational pull of a legacy reputation, development on IBM i systems continue to move into new arenas. Shops are modernizing their applications not just to eliminate green-screen displays but to also add features and functionality. Databases are being modernized for the same reasons. And tools that benefit the modernization process are being enhanced.

  Change management software (CMS) is in the thick of this. Michael Morgan, managing director of the CMS development company Midrange Dynamics, sees IBM i shops investing in new technologies. He’s doing the same to keep pace with the early adopters and to prepare for …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 28

  February 28, 2018 Dan Burger

  Was that a deer in the headlights look you gave your boss after he asked if you could integrate Salesforce with the IBM i? If so, you might ask for a do-over after you read this article. This might be one of those times when you’ll be surprised what an i can do.

  How about a simple user interface that makes things easy for the end user? Do you have one of those in mind? Chances are good some of you have a cramp in your development productivity due to a maintenance burden. What can you do about it? Monitor …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 8

  February 28, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Breaking News! (This is beginning to feel a little bit like the CNN news scroll.) There are more PTFs for the Spectre and Meltdown (SM) speculative execution security vulnerabilities. As you well know by now, the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities have been classified by IBM’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) as having a “High Severity” level.

  The news this week is that there is a new security bulletin for all to read. Here is the link, and we have tried to convey the details in the worksheet in the IBM i PTF Guide.

  The gist of it …

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• Inside IBM’s Power S924 Power9 Entry System

  February 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say for sure, but the two most popular Power9 machines that IBM will sell in the current and coming years will probably be the single-socket Power S914 or the two-socket Power S924. A lot depends on performance, which we don’t have metrics for yet, but one of these machines is going to be the volume leader – unless they are neck and neck.

  We flipped a coin to decide which machine to cover first, and heads was the Power S914 and tails was the Power S924, and the quarter showed the American eagle and not George …

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• Being Agile With IBM i In A Changing Business Climate

  February 26, 2018 Dan Burger

  Business conditions are changing, and C-level executives are troubled by a lack of IT responsiveness to changing business conditions.

  CIOs are feeling the pressure to step up. At the bi-annual CIO Summit, hosted by Seiden Group’s Alan Seiden, IT executives discuss agile development practices as one tool to help their IBM i development teams deliver better business solutions in situations where IT is breaking new technical ground or user requirements are uncertain.

  “IBM i environments of the past were unified with RPG and Db2 and with few choices for user interface. Developers would copy an older program and …

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• Guru: Ready Or Not, Big Changes in RDi V9.6! Part 1, Key Behavior

  February 26, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Version 9.6 of RDi has many new features. If you’ve upgraded your RDi, you have undoubtedly noticed some of the enhancements, because most of the new features are enabled by default. Just in case you’re not a huge fan of some of those features, most can also be disabled to make things work as before if you know where to look.

  In this series, we’ll take a look at some of the new features and how to enable and/or disable them. In this first part, we’ll study two new key behaviors and how to control them.

  Many of the enhancements …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: About Face

  February 26, 2018 Hesh Wiener

  There was a time when a typeface was made of metal and its characters, called glyphs, physically transferred ink to paper. Today, a typeface is a set of symbols that may be used to transfer ink to paper or to paint text on a screen or to inform a heads-up display. Beginning in November 2017, IBM put its corporate clout behind a signature family of typefaces called Plex. Plex will also be a signature for Ginny Rometty and IBM’s paean to Johannes Gutenberg.

  Gutenberg, born about 1400, developed technology that enabled the industrial production of printed matter, including …

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• GDPR Deadline Looms for IBM i Shops

  February 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Have you seen the website with the Grim Reaper counting down the days when support for IBM i 7.1 will end? There are 63 days left, if you’re keeping track. But a scant 25 days after IBM stops supporting IBM i 7.1 on April 30, time will be up for another important IT milestone: compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  The GDPR is a major new data privacy and protection law that goes into effect on May 25. It was passed two years ago by the European Commission with the goal of standardizing the wide assortment of laws …

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• Tooling Around With IBM i Access Client Solutions Announcements

  February 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Access Client Solutions (ACS) received several feature/function enhancements when the Technology Refreshes were announced last week with a little something for end users, system administrators, and database engineers. Although nothing stands out as a major item, this is an incremental release fulfilling user-requested features.

  The 5250 emulator is a good example. It’s a key technology that is likely the most used component in ACS, but it’s been around for so long it’s easy to think there’s nothing new in emulation. But users never seem to cease to ask for something new: support for Chinese CCSID 1371 is one of those …

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• BRMS Cloud Backups Get Recovery Teeth

  February 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use Backup, Recovery and Media Services for i (BRMS) have been able to save their backups to the cloud for over a year. However, they faced restrictions when it came to restoring those backups to a system that wasn’t the originating server, which made the feature less useful in real-world disaster. Now IBM and its development partners are removing that restriction with the latest batch of IBM i tech refreshes.

  We touched on the new BRMS capability last week in our round-up story about IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 4 (TR4) and IBM i 7.2 TR8. …

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