• Aberdeen and IBM Team Up for Midmarket Security Assessments

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IT market researcher Aberdeen Group and IBM have teamed up to offer midrange IT shops a survey-driven security assessment tool to help them figure out how secure their IT assets are. The survey does not involve submitting your systems to any kind of probing by either Aberdeen or IBM, but is rather driven by a database of survey information based on 30,000 midrange shops that Aberdeen has talked to in the past two years, and then its reckoning of what best practices in terms of server, client, and network security should be. After taking the 10-minute survey, Aberdeen tells you

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• Foreign Exchange, Biz Slowdown Hit BluePhoenix in Q3

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  BluePhoenix Solutions, a maker of legacy application modernization tools for midrange and mainframe platforms, reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2008 last week, and said that its revenues and profits were adversely impacted by whipsawing currency exchange rates between its Israeli home market and the North American and European countries where it does a lot of its business. For the quarter ended in September, BluePhoenix posted sales just a smidgen over $22 million, up 4.5 percent, but the company had an operating loss of $5.2 million, a net loss of $6.84 million, and a net loss

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• Big Sam Speaks–And That Doesn’t Happen Every Day

  November 17, 2008 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Just after the presidential election two weeks ago, IBM‘s president, chief executive officer, and chairman, Sam Palmisano, gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And for once, he did something you do not see every day–or even every year–from the head honcho at Big Blue: He spoke his mind about the issues facing the country and the world. They say a man cannot serve two masters, but in my experience in the IT journalism racket, a man who wants to pay his bills usually has to serve two, or perhaps more, masters. So while

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• Jinfonet Boosts Performance of Reporting Tool

  November 13, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Jinfonet Software yesterday announced the general availability JReport 9, a new version of the Java-based business intelligence tool that’s designed to integrate directly into Web applications. Improvements to JReport’s memory utilization have boosted its performance by at least 40 percent, according to Jinfonet, while enhancements to its user interface, support for JSR168, and several dozen other new features round out the release. JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools used by some of the largest companies in the world, including Bank of America and Deutsch Bank. The software runs on any Java-based Web application server, and is typically

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• What Is AJAX?

  November 12, 2008 Paul Tuohy

  If you happen to dabble with any sort of Web development (or even if you don’t), you have probably heard of Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Mark-up Language (XML)–better known as AJAX. Depending on who you talk to AJAX is either “another flash in the pan” or “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” As usual, the truth probably falls somewhere in between. In this, the first of two articles, I want to discuss what AJAX is and why you might want to use it. In the following article I will give a simple example of using AJAX with an RPG CGIDEV2

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• Retrieve the User ID at Run Time In a .NET Environment

  November 12, 2008 Hey Mike

  I am coding a .NET reporting application. The new .NET reports need to look like the old iSeries reports with the user name at the top. I am using the DB2 managed provider to connect to the data files. My code for connecting is: Public cni5 As iDB2Connection cni5 = New iDB2Connection("DataSource=" + My.Settings.PTCValue) cni5.Open() When connecting, the .NET Windows application displays the Client Access sign-on screen just like the iSeries Access for Windows program does. I can see the connection on the iSeries side under the QUSRWRK Subsystem. It is called QZDASOINIT, user is QUSER, type is PJ (prestart

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• Admin Alert: Readers Pimp Joe’s Font, Win No-Prize

  November 12, 2008 Joe Hertvik

  On behalf of Admin Alert reader Jean-Pierre, I recently challenged my readers to a contest to pimp my PC5250 font size in a consistent and validly cool manner. A number of readers responded and they solved Jean-Pierre’s problem, winning themselves no-prizes in the bargain. Here’s how our most recent challenge came about and how it was solved. The Making of a Pimp Contest Jean-Pierre wanted to change the default font size on his PC5250 sessions, but he couldn’t make the change stick. He was able to change and save the font size on his first session, but every time he

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• When the Taxman Cometh, Independent Systems Is There

  November 11, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Another national election came and went last week, leading to the election of new leaders and the passage of new laws. While the promise of change from President-elect Barack Obama made the biggest headlines, businesses around the country should not overlook the many tax increases (or even decreases) approved at the state, county, city, and special-district level. Hand coding these changes directly into an ERP or accounting system can be a daunting task, but thanks to Independent Systems, System i shops can automate the calculations and remittance, and keep the taxman at bay. Independent Systems, which was bought by

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• SpoolFlex 4.2 Gives Customers More Control Over i Output

  November 11, 2008 Alex Woodie

  It will be easier to produce highly tailored Excel spreadsheets loaded with i5/OS data using the latest release of the SpoolFlex output management system unveiled by DRV Technologies last week. SpoolFlex 4.2 brings new options for specifying how i5/OS data will appear when converted to the XLS format, including font, size, justification, and even color highlighting of rows and cells. The new release also makes it easier to configure SpoolFlex’s e-mail distribution feature on System i servers. SpoolFlex is a mature and stable product designed to help System i shops reduce their dependency on printers and paper output by grabbing

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• Informatica Seeds Data Integration Cloud, Sees Pay Off

  November 11, 2008 Alex Woodie

  Informatica is having success selling data integration tools and services to customers and providers of software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing services. Last week the Silicon Valley outfit revealed that more than 10 percent of its OEM partners are cloud computing providers. The company also unveiled its latest cloud-based offering for Salesforce.com customers, and launched a new training and certification program around the data quality discipline. Informatica is one of the leading providers of what used to be known as extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools. ETL tools have gradually morphed into a new class of data integration

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