• Oracle Wants To Send SAP A $776.7 Million TomorrowNow Bill

  May 7, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Software giant Oracle, which is seeking a retrial of the lawsuit against defunct third-party ERP maintainer TomorrowNow and its parent, rival SAP, told the U.S. District Court that is hearing the retrial that it will seek $776.7 million in damages against SAP. Considering how puny the TomorrowNow business actually was, this is still a very large amount of money to ask for damages. But it is far less than the $1.3 billion that a jury awarded Oracle in the first trial against TomorrowNow and SAP, even if it is a lot more than the $272 million that U.S.

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• Get IBM i Work Management And Security Skills In Under A Week

  May 7, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Just because the IBM i has been around awhile doesn’t mean there aren’t new operators coming to the platform in need of education on how to better utilize its power. And it’s probably safe to assume there are even a few experienced operators out there who could use a brush-up on the basics. In today’s workplace, where budgets are tight and headcounts are small, employees often have to dive in and learn on the job. So when time and money can be made available for training, companies want to know their employees are coming back with skills that can be

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• CL Error-Handling With APIs

  May 2, 2012 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. I had the great pleasure of meeting Brian Rusch in Milwaukee last month, when I spoke to the Wisconsin Midrange Computer Professionals Association (WMCPA). Brian told me about the method his shop uses to handle CL program exceptions. I’d like to share it with you. IBM has established an architecture for exception handling. When a program exception occurs, the system may send one or more diagnostic messages that give information about the error. The system does send an escape message, which summarizes the problem and cancels the program.

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• How Do I Format Date Literals? Let Me Count The Ways

  May 2, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I have a strange SQL problem. I have an SQL DELETE command that works perfectly in interactive SQL. But when I use Run SQL Statement (RUNSQLSTM) to execute it, it does not find any rows to delete. –Jabir Strange, indeed. I gave Jabir some suggestions, but none of them helped. Jabir found his problem himself. In one of those environments (he didn’t say which), the date format was *MDY, while the date format of the other one was *DMY. SQL was interpreting a date value in two different ways. It’s fortunate that Jabir did not test with a date that

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• Admin Alert: Secrets Of The IBM i IPL Parameters

  May 2, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  IBM i operating systems contain a number of attributes that are used to control IPL processing when you start or restart a partition. Some attributes (such as Start To Restricted State) are well-known, while others are seldom looked at. This week, let’s take a look at your system’s IPL attributes and how they can help you perform specific functions on your system. Viewing And Changing Your IPL Parameters You can view and change your IPL parameters by typing in the Change IPL Attributes (CHGIPLA) command from a 5250 green screen and pressing the F4 key. When you do this, you’ll

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• TEMBO Claims Non-Disruptive Migration of IBM i Apps to SQL Engine

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  TEMBO Technology Lab has chosen next week’s COMMON conference as a launch pad for AO Foundation, a new tool designed to automatically modify IBM i applications utilizing DB2/400’s native SQL engine without requiring a recompilation or using surrogates. AO Foundation is the first of several tools the South African company has in the works to help IBM i shops break up their monolithic code bases, rebuild with a multi-tier architecture, and increase the agility of companies in the process. Most of the modernization tools on the IBM i market focus on building GUIs replete with the latest Web technology. This

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• Infor Expands Salesforce.com Work as 1st Joint Customer Goes Live

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor and Salesforce.com are working on two new products that will deliver ordering- and marketing-related functionality as part of its joint Inforce line of offerings. And the CEO of the first Infor customer to go live on the generally available Inforce Everywhere product–the IBM i shop C.H. Briggs–shared her thoughts on the importance of integrating front- and back-office functions during last week’s Inforum 2012 conference. C.H. Briggs is the largest independently owned distributor of interior and specialty building products in the U.S. The Reading, Pennsylvania-based company buys building products from 250 manufacturers around world, and sells them to residential and

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• Cilasoft Ships Authority Manager Tool for IBM i

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are concerned about tracking the activities of IT professionals as they’re logged onto IBM i servers may want to check out the new Elevated Authority Manager (EAM) tool from Cilasoft. The software provides a rich array of options for controlling the use of powerful user profiles, such as those with QSECOFR authority and keeping an organization compliant with government regulations. EAM gives organizations two ways to temporarily grant powerful authorities to IT professionals who need to work on an IBM i server. First, a user can be swapped into a different user profile that contains the necessary

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• Infor Cuts Price of ION Middleware by Over Half

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Infor is temporarily reducing the price of its ION Foundation suite by 60 percent. The price cut, which was announced at last week’s Inforum 2012 conference, was made to encourage Infor customers to adopt the middleware component that’s key to the vendor’s product strategy–and just as important for Infor customers that want new functionality. Now through July 31, Infor is offering a one-time discount of 60 percent off the cost of ION Foundation, a suite of tools that includes: ION Connect, an enterprise service bus (ESB) and message broker that’s based on open source, Java Messaging Service (JMS)-based Apache ActiveMQ

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• VAI Announces Roadmap for IBM i-Based ERP

  May 1, 2012 Alex Woodie

  VAI recently announced that it’s released a roadmap for S2K Enterprise Resource, its IBM i-based ERP software used by small and midsize manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. The company says the roadmap calls for S2K to be enhanced in several areas, including big data, cloud computing, mobile computing, analytics, CRM, and collaboration. VAI says it has a lot of new stuff in the pipeline. Like many ERP software vendors, VAI is working on figuring out the best way to bring new cloud, mobile, and analytic capabilities to its user base. Its customers are also being affected by the so-called “big data”

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