• Under New CEO, HelpSystems Snaps Up Rival Halcyon

  January 12, 2015 Alex Woodie

  New HelpSystems CEO Chris Heim didn’t waste any time making his first big move last week when the company announced the acquisition of Halcyon Software, its closest natural competitor in systems management. The acquisition and the hiring of Heim–a one-time programmer with an eye for product development–kicked off a new era for HelpSystems following the retirement of former CEO Janet Dryer, who has been with the company for 30 years. HelpSystems looks a lot different today than when Dryer took over the top job at Help/Systems (it had a slash in its name until recently) 16 years ago. At

  … Read more

• Admin Alert: What Should an IBM i Administrator Do, Part 2

  December 17, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  Last week, I discussed why shops still need IBM i administrators and started describing a checklist of tasks that are well-suited for less experienced administrators. My checklist showcased duties that can easily be turned over to lower level administrators, leaving more experienced people free to complete projects that benefit your organization. Today, I’ll complete describing the IBM i administrator checklist. The Checklist Continued As discussed last week, here’s a starter list of duties that can easily be turned over to an IBM i system administrator. IBM i user provisioning Auditing the system Software setups and on-going software database maintenance Backup

  … Read more

• In Praise Of One-Off Tools

  December 17, 2014 Ted Holt

  This is the last issue of Four Hundred Guru for 2014, and in the last issue of a year I try to write about something unusual, something different from the routine stuff we usually run in this august publication. I worked on several interesting projects in 2014, but the one I want to talk about today will seem really retrograde to you. I wrote a bunch of System/36 RPG II programs. How I wrote them is the real story. In early 2014, a friend of mine emailed a request. A client of his, who still runs an S/36, was going

  … Read more

• End of Year Feedback

  December 17, 2014 Ted Holt

  It’s been a wonderful year, in spite of all the difficulties, problems, and vicissitudes of life that I would rather not have faced. I appreciate all the email that you’ve sent in response to the articles we published. To know that we’ve done something to make someone’s life easier and better gives me great satisfaction. I’d like to share some of your comments with your fellow Four Hundred Guru readers. May you enjoy the holidays, and may 2015 be your best year ever. Hey, Ted: I just read Use Wireshark To Diagnose IBM i Communications Problems. You can bypass

  … Read more

• IBM: CMOD for i ‘Alive and Well’

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  In last week’s The Four Hundred, we ran a story titled “Content Manager OnDemand For i Withdrawn In 2016.” It turns out that the product is very much alive. “It is alive and well,” Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development and systems management for IBM i at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, told us. For a while, it seemed clear enough that CMOD for i was dead. According to IBM U.S. Withdrawal Announcement 914-242 dated November 11, all of the CMOD for i products that IBM sells under the product ID number 5770-RD1 were

  … Read more

• ManageEngine Bolsters Password Sync Tool

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  A new release of ManageEngine‘s cross-platform password synchronization tool, ADSelfService Plus, should make it easier for administrators to ensure that native password changes made from Windows are propagated to all other supported systems, including IBM i. ADSelfService Plus is a password management tool that does two things. First, it provides a Web-based interface where end users can reset their own passwords, as defined in Microsoft Windows Active Directory, which is the main repository of access control information for many companies (including IBM i shops). Secondly, ADSelfService Plus contains a password sync component that will automatically propagate those Active Directory

  … Read more

• Jack Henry Sharpens Digital Marketing with ‘Kernel’

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Banks are sitting on a treasure trove of data about their customers’ purchasing activity, but largely lack the tools to enable them to capitalize on it. Bank software giant Jack Henry & Associates hopes to reverse that trend with a new offering from its ProfitStars division. Despite having an extraordinary level of access to customer data, retail banks still do not understand the needs of their customers, according to a recent survey by NGDATA. That leaves much to be desired when it comes to building a good relationship and delivering personalized customer service, the firm noted. Jack Henry is

  … Read more

• A Better Way to View IBM i Journal Contents?

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  IBM provides a fairly suitable command, DSPJRN, for retrieving journal information. It tells you why the data in a file changed, which program changed, and what user was responsible. The only thing it doesn’t do well is show you actual contents of the file. That’s where a new command from iData Development Limited comes in. You can get to the journal data in DSPJRN, but only if you’re good at doing backflips, according to Mark Golden, the principle at iData, which is based in the UK. “You could display it on the screen and, by using various function keys from

  … Read more

• IBM Delivers Tech Preview for iAccess on Mobile Devices

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  As part of the launch of IBM i 7.2 way back in May, IBM promised us a new “mobile perspective” for the IBM i Access for Web product that would allow systems administrators to manage the server from the mobile comfort of Android, iOS, or Windows devices. That tech preview was recently made available. IBM i Access for Web, you will recall, is an older client for IBM i, but one that IBM is intent on keeping around and improving, as opposed to other members of the “iAccess,” clan, like iAccess for Windows and iAccess for Linux, which are

  … Read more

• Enforcive’s Cross-Platform Security Mandate

  December 9, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Auditors don’t really care what kinds of servers you run in your institution–they just want to be sure their security settings are set appropriately and the exceptions duly noted. Now, thanks to the new Cross-Platform Compliance offering from Enforcive, organizations can automatically monitor their compliance with security policies across IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Windows systems with a single tool. Enforcive’s new CPC offering, which it launched two months ago, is modeled on its Policy Compliance Manager for IBM i tool. That tool helps hundreds of IBM i shops around the world monitor their adherence to security policies, and

  … Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles