• Go Ahead And Test It, Midrange Dynamics Says

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s tough to argue against the importance of testing new and modified applications before rolling them into production, especially with the www.healthcare.gov debacle still unfolding. While IBM i shops aren’t likely to roll out anything as big and complex as that website, they still should perform functional and regression testing, and new tools from change management software vendor Midrange Dynamics can help. The headliner of the latest release of Midrange Dynamics’ change management software, MDCMS version 7.1.1, is a new feature designed to make it very easy to copy production data to test environments. According to the vendor, developers can

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• ExaGrid Unveils New High-End Backup Appliance

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  ExaGrid last month unveiled its biggest backup appliance yet, the EX21000E, which holds can hold up to 210 TB of full backups when 10 of them are linked together in a grid. And thanks to a partnership with LaserVault, pushing backups from the IBM i server doesn’t involve weird Linux commands or expensive IBM backup software. ExaGrid makes disk-to-disk (D2D) appliances designed to address the backup and recovery needs of midsize organizations with growing data storage needs. The company says its horizontally distributed scale-out architecture gives it an advantage over other architectures that require forklift upgrades to expand capacity.

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• Infor M3 Gets Fresh with Food

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Infor is working on a new version of its M3 ERP system that’s specifically designed to meet the needs of ultra-fresh food manufacturers whose products have a shelf life of days, rather than weeks or months. The food and beverage market is one of Infor’s strongest vertical industries for the Lawson M3 software, in addition to the clothing/footwear and equipment sale and rental industries. Along with the major verticals, Infor differentiates itself from other ERP vendors by targeting hundreds of so-called “micro-vertical” industries where it can deliver fine-tuned functionality and processes for specific types of businesses. The new ultra fresh

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• Cloud MFT from Ipswitch Gets Mobile

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Ipswitch File Transfer last week unveiled MOVEit Cloud 8.0, a new version of its managed file transfer (MFT) software that customers can deploy in their own private clouds. New Android and iOS clients headline the new features in version 8. MOVEit Cloud version 8 is the second major release of the cloud product since Ipswitch first unveiled it in 2012. The Windows-based software delivers the same core set of secure file transfer features and capabilities that Ipswitch offers with its regular MOVEit products, including MOVEit File Transfer Server and MOVEit Ad Hoc Transfer. This includes support for FTPS, SFTP, and

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• Joomla’s CMS is RAD

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for a full-featured content management system (CMS) to run sophisticated Web sites might want to check out the latest release of Joomla, the PHP-based open source CMS. With the newly released version 3.2, Joomla gets lots of enhancements, with a big focus in the areas of app development, security, authentication, and version control. In early November, the Joomla Project and Community announced the availability of version 3.2 as a stable release. With about 600 new features and bug fixes, version 3.2 is the biggest release of the CMS ever, according to project coordinators.

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• Kronos Ditches Reports with Analytics Updates

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Kronos last week announced updates to its Workforce Analytics offering that should help customers make sense of large amounts of employee-related data stored in various Kronos applications. The company also used its annual KronosWorks user conference to tout big gains made in hosting its customers’ HR apps in the cloud. With the Workforce Analytics update, there will be a big focus on using visualizations to allow managers to explore their employee-related data sets in a self-service manner. For example, managers can start out using heat-map visualizations and 2-D imaging to see broad-based data about overtime, absence, scheduling, and productivity data.

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• Spinnaker Says Third-Party Support Biz Growing at a 30 Percent Clip

  November 19, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Spinnaker Support, which provides third-party technical support for ERP and CRM systems from Oracle, JD Edwards, and SAP, brought in 34 percent more money during the third quarter of 2013 than it did in Q3 last year, the company announced last month. One of the accounts it landed during the quarter was a big JD Edwards World shop by the name of Cook County. When it comes to third-party support for ERP applications, there are two main games in town: Spinnaker Support, which is based in the old JD Edwards stomping grounds of Denver, Colorado, and Rimini

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• Power8 Offers Big Blue And IBM i A Clean Slate

  November 18, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometime around the middle of next year, IBM will start shipping the initial Power Systems machines based on the Power8 processors. Now is the time to start thinking about the business that Big Blue wants to have with the IBM i platform. And it is also the time for IBM i shops to start thinking about what kind of platform they want from IBM and how they want it to fit into their business and budgets. This is a perfect time to shake things up. As you will recall, earlier in the summer I went through the details on the

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• IBM i Developers Sound Off On JavaScript Frameworks

  November 18, 2013 Alex Woodie

  If you’re an IBM i developer, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the amazing stuff that people are doing on the Web with JavaScript. However, as an IBM i professional, JavaScript may seem like a foreign language to you. Luckily, you’re not the first IBM i developer to venture down the JavaScript path. In fact, many IBM i developers have used JavaScript long enough to develop strong opinions about them, especially as it relates to Ext JS versus jQuery. As you might expect, there are dozens of JavaScript libraries out there to choose from. Evaluating all of them is best left to

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• The Risk Of Doing Nothing With Modern RPG And DB2

  November 18, 2013 Dan Burger

  The cost of application maintenance can really shrivel the effectiveness of IT. Too many people with too many hours devoted to maintenance should be raising red flags. One thing you can do to diminish the application maintenance money pit is re-evaluating mature (overly kind description) applications. Converting old RPG apps to modern free form RPG apps should be a consideration. But how many IBM midrange shops will take a look with an eye toward long-term savings? Technology Refresh 7, available now as a PTF for companies running IBM i 7.1, can provide a substantial advantage, but even the log jam

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