• Barcode Company T.L. Ashford Introduces Forms Generation Software

  January 21, 2015 Dan Burger

  Conversion of IBM i spool files to a format that readily fits into a business workflow process is a great idea. Lots of companies have done this successfully by starting with a clear and well defined business problem to solve. And now T.L. Ashford, a company best known for its IBM i-compatible barcode software, is in the electronic forms business with a new product called TLA Forms. The software is designed to extract data from IBM midrange systems’ spool files and place it into a custom designed form as text, barcodes, or graphics. The spool files are what drives

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• IBM Wraps Up Change In 2014, Looks Ahead To 2015

  January 21, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Although the company might be called International Business Machines, the real drivers, at least in 2015, are set to revolve around data, cloud, and engagement. That was the message from Martin Schroeter, IBM’s chief financial officer, who walked Wall Street analysts through the company’s financial results for the fourth quarter of 2014 after the markets closed on Tuesday. While Power Systems and System z servers and various storage products will be a foundation for IBM’s business, Big Blue will continue to push its software and services in the pursuit of revenue and profit growth. As is usually the case, Ginni

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• A SoftLanding For AUTOMON. . . . InterSigning From InterForm. . . . Where Oh Where Did My BABY Go (Windows). . . .

  January 21, 2015 Alex Woodie

  In this issue’s roundup of IBM i news, we cover the latest AUTOMON offerings from SoftLanding, a new digital signature capture solution from InterForm (which is sold as ArtForm/400 here in the U.S.), and the 2015 edition of Infinite’s BABY36. A SoftLanding for AUTOMON UNICOM Global subsidiary SoftLanding Systems recently issued new releases of its AUTOMON suite of systems management tools for the IBM i. The New Hampshire company bolstered several AUTOMON components, including the job scheduler, called iSchedule; the iConsole message monitoring tool; and iMessage, which allows users to respond to messages remotely. The new release of iSchedule should

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• Faking Create Or Replace Table

  January 20, 2015 Ted Holt

  The new CREATE OR REPLACE feature of SQL has been most helpful to me. It works for aliases, functions, masks, permissions, procedures, sequences, triggers, variables and views. It would be nice if it worked for tables, especially when I’m developing a new application. Here’s a workaround. The trick is to use a dynamic compound statement. If you’re not familiar with these, I recommend you read Michael Sansoterra’s excellent article on that subject. One of the things that dynamic compound statements let you do is include conditional logic, which is what we need. We need a way to drop a table

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• Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 1, Navigation

  January 20, 2015 Susan Gantner

  I’ve seen a particularly sharp increase in the use of RDi (or Rational Developer for i) by RPGers this year. I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that it contains the only editor that supports the new V7 all-free-format version of the RPG language. Even among shops that are not planning to make use of free form D specs right away, this limitation seems to have made people realize that the writing was on the wall and that SEU’s day had come and gone. One way that I gauge the interest in RDi is in the

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• Regurgitating Data With DB2 For i Data Change Table References

  January 20, 2015 Hey,

  Four Hundred Guru: I’ve been reading your SQL articles in hopes of finding a solution to a problem. I need to insert the same data into two tables at the same time in detail form to one table and in summary form to the other. Is such a thing possible? I have an incoming transaction table that I want to insert into another table. The incoming transaction table has multiple columns and some of those columns are quantities (integer) fields or amount (with a decimal) fields. I want SQL to run an INSERT INTO… SELECT FROM type statement to

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• IBM i Wish List For 2015

  January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is the beginning of a new year, and this is the appropriate time to ponder the things we would like to see happen in the IBM i community over the coming year. As I have said many times, the only way you ever get anything in this world is to ask for it, so I took a few moments to come up with a list of things that I would like to see IBM do in the coming year to help support and extend the IBM i community. Please let us know what you would like to see happen

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• TEMBO Regroups, Preps for New Database Modernization Push

  January 19, 2015 Alex Woodie

  The folks at TEMBO Technology Lab knew a tough road was ahead when they set out to fundamentally transform how IBM i shops use DB2. You don’t tell IBM i pros that they’re doing it wrong with record-level I/O, and not expect to get a funny look or two. But to its credit, when TEMBO encountered resistance to its SQL mantra, the company stepped back, regrouped, and figured out another approach. “It’s been a long hard slog,” says TEMBO CEO Marinus Van Sandwyk. “The one thing that really caught us off guard initially was we had to explain to these

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• Modernization Projects On The Rise, Says Fresche Legacy

  January 19, 2015 Dan Burger

  Every IBM midrange shop needs one of these–a person who goes around the office from desk to desk explaining, in defense lawyer earnest and animation, the magnificence of this built-for-business computer system. What it can accomplish is worthy of attention. What is actually does is largely overlooked and what it doesn’t do is overblown and used to plan its execution. What can this system accomplish is the question that most business executives want answered. Andy Kulakowski says more and more execs are finding the answer and moving their businesses forward. Kulakowski is intent on moving his company forward, and his

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• Power Systems Inspire New z13 Mainframe

  January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the old days, the mainframe and midrange divisions of IBM rivalled each other almost as much as they took on competition from outside the walls of Big Blue. But since the mid-1990s, when the company first started converging its system lines and made sure they could all run Java and its application server, the different system units of IBM have been collaborating and converging. Now, after selling off its System x division to Lenovo Group last fall, IBM is down to two system divisions within a single IBM Systems group. The first machine to come out of the

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