• Most Innovative IBM i Products: A FHS Year in Review

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Where will IBM i products go in 2015? They will likely look a lot like 2014, which was heavy on mobile and Web development technologies, open standards, and security. Let’s take a stroll through the Four Hundred Stuff (FHS) archive, now 13-years strong, and recount the top new, improved, or innovative IBM i products that we saw over the past 12 months, from a purely non-objective, editorially biased, seat-of-one’s pants standpoint. January: Open Display Files The year started with looksoftware (now Fresche Legacy) unveiling an offering based on the Open Display File (ODF) standard. IBM‘s Rational Open Access:

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• BCD Advances PHP-on-i Development in WebSmart

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  BCD Software has supported the PHP language with its WebSmart suite of IBM i development tools for several years. But with the last week’s unveiling of WebSmart version 10.6, the Chicago-based company is allowing PHP coders to do more advanced development using object-oriented techniques thanks to the addition of Zend Framework 2 (ZF2) and PHP data object (PDO) templates. WebSmart’s support for ZF2 is aimed at more advanced developers who are looking to build enterprise-grade applications that incorporate a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture and object-oriented (OO) coding techniques. ZF2 provides this core MVC layer, and now BCD supports ZF2 in its

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• Simulated Role Swaps–Maxava’s Secret Weapon

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  It may sound trite, but during a disaster you can expect the unexpected. No matter how much planning you put into your disaster preps, chances are good you overlooked something. It’s also true that, without any planning, your chances of surviving the disaster are poor. That’s why high availability software vendor Maxava puts a strong emphasis on testing using its simulated role swap (SRS) functionality. The SRS feature, which is available only on Maxava’s high-end offering called Enterprise+, allows IBM i customers to test their failover processes to see whether the backup machine is ready to handle the load in

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• Enforcive’s Cross-Platform Security Mandate

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Auditors don’t really care what kinds of servers you run in your institution–they just want to be sure their security settings are set appropriately and the exceptions duly noted. Now, thanks to the new Cross-Platform Compliance offering from Enforcive, organizations can automatically monitor their compliance with security policies across IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows systems with a single tool. Enforcive’s new CPC offering, which it launched two months ago, is modeled on its Policy Compliance Manager for IBM i tool. That tool helps hundreds of IBM i shops around the world monitor their adherence to security policies, and

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• IBM Delivers Tech Preview for iAccess on Mobile Devices

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  As part of the launch of IBM i 7.2 way back in May, IBM promised us a new “mobile perspective” for the IBM i Access for Web product that would allow systems administrators to manage the server from the mobile comfort of Android, iOS, or Windows devices. That tech preview was recently made available. IBM i Access for Web, you will recall, is an older client for IBM i, but one that IBM is intent on keeping around and improving, as opposed to other members of the “iAccess,” clan, like iAccess for Windows and iAccess for Linux, which are

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• A Better Way to View IBM i Journal Contents?

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM provides a fairly suitable command, DSPJRN, for retrieving journal information. It tells you why the data in a file changed, which program changed, and what user was responsible. The only thing it doesn’t do well is show you actual contents of the file. That’s where a new command from iData Development Limited comes in. You can get to the journal data in DSPJRN, but only if you’re good at doing backflips, according to Mark Golden, the principle at iData, which is based in the UK. “You could display it on the screen and, by using various function keys from

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• Jack Henry Sharpens Digital Marketing with ‘Kernel’

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Banks are sitting on a treasure trove of data about their customers’ purchasing activity, but largely lack the tools to enable them to capitalize on it. Bank software giant Jack Henry & Associates hopes to reverse that trend with a new offering from its ProfitStars division. Despite having an extraordinary level of access to customer data, retail banks still do not understand the needs of their customers, according to a recent survey by NGDATA. That leaves much to be desired when it comes to building a good relationship and delivering personalized customer service, the firm noted. Jack Henry is

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• ManageEngine Bolsters Password Sync Tool

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  A new release of ManageEngine‘s cross-platform password synchronization tool, ADSelfService Plus, should make it easier for administrators to ensure that native password changes made from Windows are propagated to all other supported systems, including IBM i. ADSelfService Plus is a password management tool that does two things. First, it provides a Web-based interface where end users can reset their own passwords, as defined in Microsoft Windows Active Directory, which is the main repository of access control information for many companies (including IBM i shops). Secondly, ADSelfService Plus contains a password sync component that will automatically propagate those Active Directory

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• IBM: CMOD for i ‘Alive and Well’

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  In last week’s The Four Hundred, we ran a story titled “Content Manager OnDemand For i Withdrawn In 2016.” It turns out that the product is very much alive. “It is alive and well,” Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development and systems management for IBM i at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, told us. For a while, it seemed clear enough that CMOD for i was dead. According to IBM U.S. Withdrawal Announcement 914-242 dated November 11, all of the CMOD for i products that IBM sells under the product ID number 5770-RD1 were

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• IBM Issues More POODLE Patches, Warns Not to Use SSLv3

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that continue to use SSLv3 to encrypt their communications are susceptible to the POODLE security vulnerability and could have their data compromised, IBM warned today in a security bulletin. IBM also issued new security patches that disable SSLv3 in IBM i’s Java runtime. While IBM recommends moving to the newer TLS protocol, many IBM i applications still require SSLv3 and will likely break when it’s disabled, IBM warns. IBM started patching its various systems against the POODLE vulnerability over a month ago when it became clear that SSLv3 needed to go. Applications patched in November include the

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