• COMMON Belgium Shifts Focus from i to IBM SMB

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, this will come as no surprise to most people considering IBM‘s rejiggering of its server product lines and marketing groups over the past year. COMMON Belgium, the midrange user group in that European country that is part of the larger COMMON Europe umbrella organization, has announced that it will be broadening its scope from the OS/400, i5/OS, and i platform to cover the entire range of small and medium business customers that use systems from IBM. The move is a logical one, considering that there is no longer a System i division within IBM’s Systems and Technology

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• That Windows-on-Power Rumor Surfaces Again

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know exactly how this rumor got started up again, but it did. Some people contacted me late last week and said that they heard from someone who heard from someone who attended the COMMON Europe Conference in Barcelona that ran in mid-May that IBM and Microsoft were working on a port of the Windows operating system to the Power6 processors. According to one telling of the rumor, Mark Shearer, the former general manager of the former System i division and now vice president of marketing and offerings for IBM’s Business Systems division, told people at COMMON Europe that

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• CDW Survey Says IT Shouldn’t Wear Green on Its Sleeves

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT professionals are, by nature, a pretty skeptical lot. You’d expect that, after being told so many promises about how such and such a technology was going to make their lives easier, and maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, and, to be fair, after making their own predictions about the impact of their own code or IT architecture, which may or may not have panned out for end users. And so it is during the new energy crunch and this whole “green IT” phenomenon. People sometimes over do it. That is not to say that large data centers are

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• Magic Software Boosts Sales, But Profits Under Pressure in Q1

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The impending announcement of its new Rich Internet Application Platform were not to blame for earnings pressure at Magic Software Enterprises in the first quarter ended March 31, but from the numbers, it looks like the effects of currency exchange rates have pushed up sales and administrative costs relative to sales levels. This is what happens when IT companies sell into the United States when the dollar is dropping in value; the reverse happens, of course, when U.S.-based IT companies do a lot of sales overseas but have their administrative costs booked in local dollars. Anyway, in the first quarter,

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• The IT Services Business Keeps On A-Growing

  May 27, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Maybe it is because I have 10 gallons of London Porter homebrew gurgling behind me in my office as I write this–hopefully it will be ready to bottle by the Memorial Day weekend–but it occurs to me, watching IBM as I do and Hewlett-Packard‘s proposed $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, that the services sector of the IT racket is like a sprinkle of yeast in a giant vat of sugar water. It is perhaps going to keep growing until it eats all the sugar in the pot. While the market researchers at IDC and Gartner probably

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• Use PCOMM Scripts to Dynamically Build a Spreadsheet, Part 2

  May 21, 2008 Michael Sansoterra

  In Part 1 of this series, I demonstrated that users of IBM‘s Personnel Communications can use VBScript to run a remote PC command right from the 5250 emulator window. I want to build on that short tutorial by demonstrating how to build an Excel spreadsheet right from the context of the current 5250 screen. First of all, if you haven’t read Part 1, please read it now as there are some pointers about script writing for the PCOMM emulator that developers should be aware of. It also instructs you how to get started in writing a script and

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• Use SQL to Strip Out Tab Characters

  May 21, 2008 Hey Ted

  We have a system set up to import orders from a Website. Sometimes a field comes through from our Website with the tab character. We didn’t realize this is possible and have since started scrubbing the data before it is imported. The problem is that I already have some data in our System i tables that have the tab character in them. This is causing some odd things to happen later in our processes. I need some way to remove all of the tab characters from our database. Do you have a SQL statement or other magic way to find

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• Admin Alert: Monitoring the Monitors

  May 21, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  Recently, my shop had to create a simple monitoring program to ensure that a critical subsystem was always running. This week, I’ll review the process that we used to create that program and I’ll also show you how to perform basic monitoring by using just a few simple CL commands. With some modification, these concepts can be applied to any situation where you can’t use an off-the-shelf monitoring program. The Problem I Solved The system problem this solution addresses reminds me of the old saying about who watches the watchmen. On one of our machines, we use a third-party monitoring,

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• Symantec Combats Phishing with New Services Offering

  May 20, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IT security giant Symantec yesterday launched a new initiative to fight phishing, pharming, and other rapidly spreading types of online fraud targeting banks, e-commerce sites, brokerage houses, and other B2B or B2C institutions where lots of money changes hands. Under the new offering, called Online Fraud Protection Services, Symantec will bring to bear a battery of methods and techniques to block attacks launched against individual companies and their brands and, if possible, work with law enforcement to put the perps behind bars. It was with great fanfare that the world celebrated the 30th birthday of spam recently. The hammy substance

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• BCD Slings a New C#-Based GUI with Catapult 7.0

  May 20, 2008 Alex Woodie

  System i (formally Power Systems server) users who venture upon Business Computer Design Int’l‘s beta for Catapult version 7.0 may be surprised to find a slick new graphical user interface (GUI) written in Microsoft‘s latest .NET language, C#, has been added the product. In addition to heightened ease-of-use brought by the new GUI, Catapult 7.0’s behind-the-scenes component has been beefed up to make spool file processing much faster. Catapult is a client/server application that includes an i OS (formerly i5/OS) component that monitors spool file output queues and other sources of reports and printed output, and a Windows

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