• Austrian Software Maker Sells Off i5/OS HR Applications

  March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  An Austrian software development firm that dates back to 1968 and that was one of the innovators in the human resources application software market, Personal and Informatik, last week said that it has divested itself of its OS/400 and i5/OS human resources application, LOGA/400. Viennese IT services company Infoniqa Group will be taking over support for the product. The mainframe and midrange application ecosystems used to be quite diverse and are quite old, and many of us outside of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany have probably never heard of P&I AG or its LOGA/400 HR applications. P&I has a complex

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• BluePhoenix Adds AS/400 Experience to Business Partner Program

  March 3, 2008 Dan Burger

  The business partner and strategic alliance program at BluePhoenix has added a heavy hitter to the lineup. Alan Zwiren, a former IBM channel executive responsible for worldwide information management channel sales has taken the position of vice president of partners and strategic alliance sales for the application modernization tools and services company. Zwiren is no stranger to the System i, which figures to be a positive factor for ASNA, the System i application tools vendor that was acquired by BluePhoenix in August 2007. Zwiren is coming off seven years at Big Blue and is a 20-year veteran of the

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• IBM Ponies Up Another $15 Billion for Share Buybacks

  March 3, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Go ahead, call me stupid. Or old-fashioned. Or just plain Puritan. But I will never in a zillion years understand the logic of share buybacks–and especially those on a massive scale like IBM has undertaken since the mid-1990s. And last week, IBM’s board of directors authorized the company to shell out another $15 billion to buy back shares on the open market. As IBM itself pointed out in its announcement of the share repurchase authorization, the company has bought back a staggering $94 billion in its own stock from 1995 through 2007 inclusive. IBM still has $400 million in buybacks

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• XAMPP: The PHP Developer’s Dream

  February 27, 2008 Brian Kelly

  This is the final installment in a series of four articles by Brian Kelly on PHP. Regardless of whether your production server is a System i or a System p, or if you run x-Series servers, z-series mainframes, Solaris, or HP, your dream development machine for building dynamic PHP applications needs to have XAMPP from Apache Friends. XAMPP is a phenomenal integration package for the development components that just about every modern day Web developer requires, regardless of platform they work on. The “X” in XAMPP stands for “operating system.” The rest of the acronym is: Apache, MySQL, PHP, and

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• Programmatically Retrieve Defined System i Names

  February 27, 2008 Michael Sansoterra

  In recent tips, I have discussed some of the useful client side tools that IBM has given to developers in the iSeries Access programmer’s toolkit for Windows. In this tip, I’d like to discuss how a Windows script or program can access all of the system names defined within iSeries Navigator (soon to be renamed System i Navigator). In these days of multiple System i systems and LPARs, it is increasingly common to see multiple systems defined within iSeries Navigator. There are several scenarios where it would be useful to harvest this information for use within a program. For example,

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• Admin Alert: Five Minutes to Moving System i Objects Between Partitions

  February 27, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  Administrators in multiple System i environments are frequently called upon to save and restore files from one i5/OS machine to another. Because you may not always remember the exact steps involved in performing a transfer, this week I’m presenting a five-minute cheat sheet that details every step you need to perform in order to easily save an object and move it to a companion machine via FTP. The Basic Game Plan When moving objects between System i partitions, there are five critical steps that you need to follow. Creating or clearing an i5/OS save file on the source system Saving

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• i5/OS V6R1 Compatibility an Issue for Software Vendors

  February 26, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM will ship i5/OS V6R1 next month, but System i customers may have a bit longer to wait before third-party software developers can roll out support for the new operating system. More than half of the software vendors contacted by IT Jungle for an informal poll on V6R1 readiness said they would be ready for the new operating system at general availability. But questions remain about the readiness of the other 40 percent of vendors, particularly the ERP application vendors. When IBM ships i5/OS V6R1 next month, it will mark only the third time in the history of the platform

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• IBM Patches Security Flaw in Quickr for i5/OS

  February 26, 2008 Alex Woodie

  IBM has issued a patch for a cross-site scripting security vulnerability in Lotus Quickr for i5/OS, the computer security research and development company Secunia reported last week. The flaw was given a “less critical” rating. Meanwhile, another security flaw in i5/OS reported earlier this month has been partially patched by IBM. According to a Secunia advisory published last week, a security vulnerability in Lotus Quickr for i5/OS version 8 can be exploited by hackers to conduct cross-site scripting attacks. The problem is the result of not properly validating certain input before it’s returned to a user when anonymous access

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• BOSaNOVA Adds Encryption to Thin Clients

  February 26, 2008 Alex Woodie

  BOSaNOVA last week announced that it has added SSL encryption capabilities to the 5250 emulation running on its thin clients. The technology was added to help customers comply with the Payment Cardholder Industry (PCI) mandates, according to the company, which has been moving strongly into the IT security arena over the last year. Twin-ax controllers were once a big part of BOSaNOVA’s business. But today, you’re more likely to call the Phoenix, Arizona, company to beef up your IT security than you are to squeeze more life out of your aging SNA architecture. A year ago, the company started down

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• Symtrax Seals Deal with Attractive Pricing

  February 26, 2008 Alex Woodie

  A more attractive pricing model was one of the key reasons the Symtrax electronic forms package was selected by Andrews Sykes Hire, an English company that rents heaters, air conditioners, and other equipment manufactured by its parent company, according to a recent Symtrax case study. MapForm is an electronic document management system that allows users to move away from preprinted forms and print business output on standard laser printers. The software works by applying document overlays to output from a variety of systems, including i5/OS servers, and then either distributing the final document via e-mail or sending it to a

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