• Fujifilm Adds GPS Tracker to Tape Cartridges

  November 12, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Fujifilm USA, the Valhalla, New York, subsidiary of Japanese film and recording media giant Fujifilm, last week added a new twist to technology for adding more security to tape archives. The techies at Fujifilm, who crank out more patentable pieces of intellectual property than just about any other company in the world on behalf of the $23.6 billion Japanese conglomerate, have come up with a new product called Tape Tracker for data recording media. Fujifilm and its tape drive partners have already added encryption to LTO Generation 4 tape drives, but once a tape leaves the data center,

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• BCD’s WebSmart PHP Goes GA

  November 11, 2007 Alex Woodie

  This month marks the official launch of WebSmart PHP, a new variant of the WebSmart development environment from Business Computer Design Int’l that’s intended to make development of PHP applications easy and intuitive for System i programmers. For a license fee of about $4,000, System i developers can have their PHP generated for them, while they bone up on PHP functions by reading BCD’s extensive documentation. WebSmart PHP speeds PHP development by using a series of templates and wizards to guide users through the development process, and providing users with detailed descriptions of 5,000 PHP functions, including “instellisense” prompting. As

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• V6R1 CL Enhancements

  November 7, 2007 Ted Holt

  Thanks to the kindness of Guy Vig and Fernando Hurtado of the International Business Machines Corporation, I have information for you concerning V6R1 CL. For the third straight release, IBM has added solid features to the compiler. Since I use CL heavily, I greatly appreciate the effort. Here’s what you can look forward to when you install V6R1. Close a File CL includes a new Close Database File (CLOSE) command that you can use to close a file. This gives you another way to process a file more than once in a CL procedure. As you are no doubt aware,

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• Copy Message Descriptions

  November 7, 2007 Hey, Ted

  The Work with Message Descriptions (WRKSMSGD) panel gives me options 2, 4, 5, and 6 to change, delete, display, and print message descriptions. But there is no option to allow me to copy a message description. Such an option would be helpful when I need to create a new message description that is similar to an existing one, or when I copy a message description to another message file. Am I overlooking an easy way to copy message descriptions? –Ron To the best of my knowledge, no. (Buddy, I hope I’m wrong on this one.) Let’s take the second case

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• Admin Alert: Five Benefits of a High-Availability System

  November 7, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  I recently wrote a column describing i5/OS features that enable high availability functionality in your shop. This week, I’m narrowing the focus and discussing five benefits you can realize when installing a Capacity BackUp System (CBU) for System i failover in case of disaster. Some of these benefits are to be expected, but others might cause you to rethink your idea of a CBU and what it provides. What Is a CBU? As I described in my earlier piece, a CBU is a specially configured System i machine or partition that communicates with your main production box and replicates

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• XAware Takes the Open Source Plunge

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Data integration tool vendor XAware yesterday announced it’s leaving behind the world of propriety software development and a direct sales force, and staking its future on the commercial open source business model. As part of the move, the company is giving away licenses to XA-Suite version 5 (which was just released), launching an open source development community at www.xaware.org, and hitching its horse to database maker MySQL, whose success in commercial open source software XAware will do its best to emulate. XAware is a Colorado Springs, Colorado, company that has been developing a collection of XML-based data integration

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• Quadrant Refines PPM Offering with IntelliChief 2.0

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  A potpourri of improvements were delivered last week by Quadrant Software for IntelliChief, the paperless process management, or PPM system, aimed at improving the workflow of documents at medium- and large-size System i shops. With IntelliChief version 2.0, users should be able to pull documents from a wider variety of computer systems, verify the accuracy of the data more quickly, and route it within their organization more effectively than with previous releases. From new Web services interfaces and an audit log to more intelligent workflow processes and batch scanning capabilities that use barcodes, IntelliChief version 2.0 provides more refined ways

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• ARTech Nearly Done with ‘Rocha’ Rewrite of GeneXus 4GL

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  We’re still about three months away from seeing the general availability of “Rocha,” the codename for the 10th version of the fourth-generation language (4GL) development tool, GeneXus, from ARTech. But to hear company executives talk about it from last week’s North American user conference in Chicago, Rocha is ready for users to start using to develop next-generation Web 2.0-style applications, and even to put them into production on System i machines. Since it was founded in 1988, GeneXus has been helping companies around the world develop business applications that run on the AS/400. Since the Uruguayan company rolled out

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• VAULT400 Offers Free Insurance with ‘Quick-Ship’

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  There’s nothing like a good disaster to make one realize the value of insurance and planning. Without putting in the time, money, and effort to prepare, there can be no assurance that things will turn out well on the other side. United Computer Group, which is in the disaster recovery business with its VAULT400 online backup service, gave its iSeries customers the equivalent of a free insurance policy last week when it unveiled its new Quick-Ship program. It’s been just over a year since UCG formally launched its VAULT400 online backup business, which is based on technology it OEMs

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• 3Q Holdings to Buy IPMS for $16 Million

  November 6, 2007 Alex Woodie

  The Australian software company 3Q Holdings Limited will purchase the Island Pacific Merchandising System, an ERP-type application used by multi-channel retailers that runs exclusively under i5/OS, Island Pacific announced last week. As we reported two weeks ago, Island Pacific was close to announcing the name of the company that had agreed to buy IPMS for $16 million. Last week, the Irvine, California, company announced it had a signed agreement from 3Q Holdings to buy the aging i5/OS-based MMS, along with other assets that make up the IPMS division. As it turns out, 3Q Holdings, which was formerly known as

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