• Robot Job Scheduler Gets a Fresh New Look

  July 15, 2015 Alex Woodie

  In the world of Web design, a user interface built with a “responsive design” is equally at home on a smartphone as a Windows PC. HelpSystems took responsive design to heart with the latest update to Robot SCHEDULE, which now features a Web-based user interface that will give customers deeper insight into how jobs are running on the IBM i server. With the new interface, Robot SCHEDULE users will be able to see IBM i jobs as they’re running, and interact with them through a mobile device. If a problem crops up with a job, the interface will notify them

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• IBM i 6.1 Upgrades: What’s In Your Box?

  July 15, 2015 Dan Burger

  With IBM’s official end of support for the IBM i 6.1 operating system coming up at the end of September, it’s natural to wonder what effect this will have on the IBM i community. It’s not exactly a long walk off a short pier for those organizations using 6.1 as their primary OS. The upgrade is uncomplicated. IBM has an extended support plan for the undecided. But what about the unsupported? The winding down of 6.1 is certainly not going to stir up things like when this release was the freshest rose in the garden and support for V5R4 was

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• IBM i Access Turns Its Attention To Database

  July 13, 2015 Dan Burger

  It’s been just about two years since IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) was introduced. IBM didn’t make a lot of noise about it. Maybe that’s because IBM doesn’t market products. It markets ideas. On the other hand, it might be because ACS delivered system administration with navigation features that most people have been working with for 10 to 15 years–features such as the capabilities to drag and drop, scroll down a page, and use a mouse instead of F keys. IBM i Access Client Solutions is a replacement for the severely haggard iAccess for Windows, a product with thousands

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• As I See It: The Improbable Conference

  July 13, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Where IT is concerned, the United States has functioned as a nurselog for India’s booming IT sector. Soon after American management discovered that India’s cheap, plentiful, educated labor could produce cheap, plentiful, sophisticated software, so began the greatest job migration since clothing manufacturers fled the country. The skies over India darkened with incoming hardware, software specs careened off satellites, and Tower-of-Babel help desks were born. It was a rocky start, marked by resentment from threatened American workers, and cultural and language incompatibilities that plagued their Indian counterparts. But eventually everyone settled into the new normal. American IT moved on, specializing

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• LANSA Guides Mobile, Portal, Integration Project To Success

  July 13, 2015 Dan Burger

  The proving ground for significant IT projects is far less about speed than it is about endurance. And when you can hear about a project that was completed, it’s so much more interesting than listening to a sales pitch for technology that can take you someplace that no one has yet to travel and may be a place no sane person wants to go. Tried and tested beats new and full of promise for a lot of people despite the drumbeating that is designed to defeat anything that adheres to a slow-growth philosophy. This story is about a six-year-old project.

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• IBM’s Migration Plan To PurePower Systems

  July 13, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  More than anything else, IBM is a systems company, and it always has been. We could argue about whether or not Big Blue should have ever exited the application software business, as it started to do in the late 1980s and finished off doing in the early 1990s, but I don’t think there would be much of an argument that IBM has been and should continue to be a supplier of full systems of servers, storage, networking, and systems software like operating systems, middleware, and databases. Thankfully, even IBM does not seem to be of two minds about this, as

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• Manufacturing Automation At A ‘Crossroads’ For IBM i Shops

  July 13, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Manufacturers across the country rely heavily on their MRP or ERP systems to automate the handling of resources. That’s what the “R” stands for, after all. But it turns out that MRP and ERP systems leave a whole lot to be desired when it actually comes to managing resources–including raw materials and labor–on the shop floor. That’s where companies like Crossroads RMC and its manufacturing execution system (MES) comes into play. Crossroads RMC was founded more than 20 years ago to develop automation solutions for the factory floor. The Lisle, Illinois, company originally developed its Crossroads MES solution in the

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• Security Architecture For Business Applications

  July 7, 2015 Patrick Botz

  Developers can make it infinitely less complex to manage the security of a system and can significantly improve the security of any computer system by following a simple architecture in their applications. Conversely, not following a similar architecture makes it virtually impossible for any administrator to both maintain the best security possible and avoid failed and crashed applications. Nearly everyone in most IT shops assumes that it is the system (or security) administrator’s responsibility to manage access control for the data on the system. They also assume it is the administrator’s responsibility to fix any authority failure issues encountered by

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• How To Create Updateable Views

  July 7, 2015 Ted Holt

  It has been said that perception is more important than reality. I agree, especially when such perception is implemented as a view in a relational database. When creating a view, it is good to keep two things in mind. First, consider that a view may be updateable or read-only. An updateable view allows the user to update rows in the table through the view, but also to insert new rows and delete rows. Read-only views may only be used when retrieving data. Both types of view are superb, and each type has its uses. One strong advantage of updateable views

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• Looking For Stuff With iSphere

  July 7, 2015 Susan Gantner

  In my last tip I introduced you to the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover a few other features in iSphere that I find very useful. This time I’ll focus on a couple of options within iSphere that can help you search for things and subsequently edit them. The two things we’ll be searching are source members and message files. Looking For Stuff In Source Files Let’s start out with the iSphere Source File Search. This is a feature similar to PDM’s option 25 – Find String Using PDM (FNDSTRPDM). It lets you search for a string of

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