• New Conference Riveted on RPG and DB2 Education

  January 29, 2007 Dan Burger

  Not everyone believes that continuing education and training is necessary or that it provides a return on investment to businesses that emphasize it with their IT staff. That’s an unfortunate reality in today’s workplace that is more prominent today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. At the same time, the opportunities for those seeking to expand their abilities and add value to themselves as employees have more choices than ever before. It’s as true in the System i world as anywhere else. For some folks, it’s not a matter of whether to get more education, but which choice

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• Using the SQL SET OPTION Statement

  January 24, 2007 Michael Sansoterra

  SQL’s SET OPTION statement is a powerful way to control the parameters of the DB2 execution environment in which an SQL program runs. Using it properly will allow SQL code to execute consistently between different environments–including those thorny differences that often arise between green screen and client/server environments. Read on to find out why this statement is essential to embedded SQL programs and persistent stored modules (SQL based triggers, procedures and functions). First of all, SET OPTION is a statement that is evaluated at “compile time.” It never actually gets executed. Therefore SET OPTION can only be specified once in

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• Legible PATH and CLASSPATH

  January 24, 2007 Ted Holt

  Dear Professional: One of the things I don’t like about the Integrated File System (IFS) is its directory-based structure of untyped files. I consider the library system of strongly typed objects a much more robust architecture. Nevertheless, the IFS is reality and I have to deal with it. Here’s a short and simple tip for reading those ugly, almost indecipherable PATH and CLASSPATH variables we have to put up with. The PATH and CLASSPATH variables contain lists of directories, separated with colon characters. They function like library lists, in that the system searches the lists when looking for certain things.

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• Admin Alert: Updating Your System i5 for Daylight Saving Time Changes

  January 24, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  In the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress changed Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States so that starting this year (2007) DST begins three weeks earlier than it did last year, on the second Sunday of March. Conversely, 2007 will also see Daylight Saving Time end one week later than last year, on the first Sunday in November. This week, I’ll talk about how this change affects i5 shops. The new DST starting and ending dates are causing some minor concerns for system i5 shops because, like the rest of the computing world, i5/OS needs to be patched

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• IBM Lotus Adds Handles to Information Overload

  January 23, 2007 Dan Burger

  IBM Lotus has every intention of using Britney Spears. Not as a spokesperson, for God sakes, but as an example. Spears dominates the social networking phenomenon like Big Blue wishes it could. Specifically, Lotus wants to apply social networking to business processes and team collaboration efforts. Not that Britney doesn’t mean business, but IBM has very different ideas about putting social networking tools into the hands of business professionals in organizations around the world. In the words of Michael Rhodin, general manager at IBM Lotus, the collaborative capabilities of social software–portals, e-mail, integrated document collaboration, and unified communications–are “enterprise-ready.” That’s

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• Applied Logic Launches OS/400 Encryption Utility

  January 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  An affordable OS/400 encryption solution was launched last week by Applied Logic Software, an Oregon-based developer of several IBM midrange utilities. With Pro/Encrypt 1.4, i5/OS and OS/400 shops gain the capability to encrypt DB2/400 data, thereby paving the way toward compliance with new laws, while making it more unlikely that sensitive data falls into the wrong hands. You can scarcely open your e-mail inbox these days without reading of the latest data breech. Ten million people here, 75,000 people there, another 50 million people there–you can’t help but wonder what company identity thieves are going to target next, and

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• BOSaNOVA Launches Four Thin Clients

  January 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  Thin client news has been arriving fast and furious from BOSaNOVA lately, and the pattern continued during the last couple weeks, as the Phoenix, Arizona, company announced four new thin clients–including two additions to its slim and sleek “Rabbit” line of thin client devices, and two members of its new 1300 Series line of high performance terminals. Leading things off are the two new Rabbit terminals, the RBT-802 and the RBT-820, which run Linux and Windows operating systems, respectively. These devices are similar in many ways. They feature nearly identical hardware, including AMD LX 800 processors, up to 128 MB

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• GT Software Gives Web Service Smarts to Web-Enabled Apps

  January 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  GT Software recently issued a new release of Ivory VisualConnect, a software product for converting 5250 and 3270 screens into Web-based interfaces. With version 5.3, the company has boosted the product’s integration with Ivory Service Architect, its primary service oriented architecture (SOA) development tools, making it easier to create Web services from applications that have also been re-faced with Ivory VisualConnect. GT Software is one of a number of software companies based in Atlanta that focuses on helping OS/400 and OS/390 shops open up access to their legacy applications. While the company’s primary focus is developing software for the IBM

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• UCG to Sell VAULT400 to VAI Customers

  January 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  OS/400 ERP developer Vormittag Associates (VAI) and United Computer Group (UCG), a provider of an online backup service, announced a partnership last week that will see VAI marketing UCG’s VAULT400 service to its installed base of iSeries customers. UCG launched VAULT400 about a year ago to serve the growing market for online backup and disaster recovery solutions from its Ohio-based data centers. VAULT400 is a private-label version of EVault‘s backup technology, which has supported the OS/400 server since 2004. EVault was acquired by disk maker Seagate Technology in late December, but it appears that it has not affected EVault’s

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• ERP Software from XData Helps with Kansas Wild Horse Program

  January 23, 2007 Alex Woodie

  ERP software from Xdata Solutions is being utilized to automate several processes at the Kansas Correctional Industries (KCI), a program managed by the state’s department of corrections that puts inmates to work at various tasks, including helping to tame wild mustangs rounded up on the prairie. Last week, Xdata announced that KCI has gone live with its Graphical Xdata (GXD) suite of ERP software, which runs on OS/400 and Windows servers. According to Xdata, the software has streamlined various business processes at KCI, including order-entry, manufacturing order generation for KCI’s metal products, chemicals, and clothing business units; materials transfers; and

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