• Head’s Up: Job Watcher Can Mess With LPARs

  February 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Our good friend Doug Bidwell, over at Power Systems reseller DLB Associates and who certainly still calls himself a ‘400 reseller, wanted to give you all a head’s up about some potential issues IBM has found with the Job Watcher performance monitoring tool for the OS/400 V5R3, i5/OS V5R4, and i 6.1 operating systems when running inside LPARs when it is collecting SQL information on the system. The iDoctor suite of tools, which include Job Watcher, are often used by IBM’s Rochester tech support team or by resellers to support their i platform customers. The iDoctor team sent out the

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• Partnership Expands looksoftware’s Latin American Business

  February 2, 2009 Dan Burger

  For telecom and financial services companies that depend on Latin American BYTE software and the IBM System i, the partnership between looksoftware and BYTE, announced last week, will bring modernized applications with an improved user interface and better integration to the independent software vendor’s product lineup. Development and implementation of BYTE’s first application has already been completed. According to Homero Bosch, BYTE’s manager of distributors and channels, after “an intensive evaluation” of application modernization products was completed, it only took four weeks for the technical personnel at BYTE to generate a prototype, obtain final approval, and begin implementation of an

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• Net Loss Doesn’t Prevent JDA’s Record Q4, Year

  February 2, 2009 Dan Burger

  JDA Software handed in a fourth quarter financial report showing a loss, but more importantly managed to ring up a gain in total revenue, which resulted in a record-breaking quarter and record-breaking year for the Scottsdale, Arizona, company with a substantial IBM i customer base. Fourth quarter revenue was bolstered by a 53 percent gain in software license sales. JDA’s fourth quarter ended December 31, 2008, and for that time frame the company reported total revenues of $106.2 million and software revenues of $34.3 million, compared to total revenues of $98.5 million and software revenues of $22.4 million for fourth

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• Power Guru Prevails, Gets to Take Job at Apple

  February 2, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, that little drama has finally come to an end, and just in time for the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. Mark Papermaster, a Power processor and system chipset guru from IBM‘s Systems and Technology Group, is going to be allowed to go work as the head of Apple‘s iPod and iPhone hardware development, reporting to ailing chief executive officer, Steve Jobs. Papermaster took the job at Apple last October, and a few days later IBM sued Papermaster to block him from joining Apple. A few days after that, a Federal court judge on IBM’s home

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• How To Read A Program

  January 28, 2009 Steve Kilner

  When you have to figure out a big, complicated program you’re not familiar with, what do you do? Can you explain the process you go through? If you’re a manager of people who maintain programs, what do you know about how they figure out programs? How are they doing it? Are they doing it efficiently? Correctly? Research studies have shown that maintenance programmers spend about half their time trying to figure out the programs they are tasked with modifying. That’s half the maintenance budget. What can be done to improve this process, to increase quality, value delivered, and speed to

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• Load a Spreadsheet from a DB2/400 Database: Part 3

  January 28, 2009 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Part 1 and Part 2 of this little series on generating an Excel spreadsheet demonstrated how to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to retrieve data from DB2 on an AS/400 and place it in a spreadsheet. Additional refinements were offered on doing some fancier things to the spreadsheet, such as auto-sizing all the columns based on the loaded data, formatting date columns properly, etc. All of this was done in the name of programmatically creating a nice spreadsheet with current “DB2 for i” data. This tip

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• Admin Alert: Four Things to Beware of During a System Upgrade

  January 28, 2009 Joe Hertvik

  As I reported a few weeks ago, i5/OS V5R3 loses IBM support as of April 30th, which may cause many iSeries and System i shops to upgrade their operating systems in the next few months. If you’re currently working on a V5R3 upgrade, here are four things that you should watch out for as you plan your upgrade. Be Aware of the Difference Between Compatible and Supported Software For third-party software, it’s important to understand the difference between a compatible and a supported piece of software. I recently ran into this issue on an i5/OS V5R4 upgrade where the vendor

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• tekservePOS Launches i OS Software for Retailers at NRF

  January 27, 2009 Alex Woodie

  tekservePOS launched a new suite of i OS-based software last week at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference and expo in New York City. The new offering, called tekRETAIL Suite, provides a full-function point of sale (POS) platform for stores, at a fraction of the cost of enterprise POS vendors, the company claims. tekRETAIL Suite has two components: the POS software, called tekRETAIL Store, and tekRETAIL Central Office. tekRETAIL Store runs on Windows, while tekRETAIL Central Office runs on the IBM i OS and IBM Power Systems (formerly i5 and AS/400) servers. The POS component provides all the basic functionality

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• iMessaging and IBM Team to Drive i OS-Based IP Telephony

  January 27, 2009 Alex Woodie

  iMessaging Systems today announced significant changes to its System i telephony products and its business model that are aimed at making it easier and less expensive to integrate System i applications with phone systems. First, the company eliminated the PC hardware requirement for its iNspire suite, which is now a software-only product running entirely under i OS. Second, it overhauled its relationship with IBM, making the IBM the sole distributor of iNspire and opening the product up to Big Blue’s vast partner channel. iMessaging Systems is a New Hampshire company that develops software that connects corporate phone systems (either

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• Attachmate Refreshes Emulator with Useful New Features

  January 27, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Let’s face it–sometimes it can be difficult to get excited about a new terminal emulator. As the graphical extravagance of the Web 2.0 revolution trains us to consume data via a million exotic widgets and colorful gadgets, the green-screen 5250 display begins to look a little old. One wonders, then, what Attachmate could do to spark interest in its new terminal emulator suite, Reflection 2008, which was publicly announced yesterday. As it turns out, there’s plenty of room for innovation. As director of product marketing and management for Attachmate’s three terminal emulation lines, Michael Miller has pondered these very questions:

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