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New IBM i Technology Refreshes Announced; Available Mid-March
February 14, 2018 Dan Burger
IBM yesterday announced that Technology Refresh 8 (TR8) for IBM i 7.2 and TR4 for IBM i 7.3 will provide support for Power9 hardware, enhancements for RPG, security enhancements, and a variety of new capabilities for licensed products. The support for Power9 will be covered elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred. Here, we’ll provide an overview of the IBM i operating system, licensed programs, and software.
When TR enhancements include RPG, I like to begin there. Application developers using Rational Development Studio should take note of the new operation code referred to as DATA-INTO, which adds the …
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BVS Tool Generates PayPal Invoices From IBM i
October 25, 2017 Alex Woodie
A new product from BVS Tools lets organizations generate PayPal invoices from their IBM i screens with just a few clicks of the keyboard. The product, called GreenTools for PayPal (G4PP), has the potential to save customers a lot of time compared to manually creating invoices in the PayPal environment.
Use of PayPal is growing quickly as consumers look for alternative ways to buy things, particularly from their mobile phones. According to Statista, about one third of U.S. retailers accept payments through PayPal, and another 21 percent are expected to add PayPal support soon. The electronic payment network, which was …
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One IBM i Route Into the API Economy
September 27, 2017 Alex Woodie
The so-called API Economy is emerging as a legitimate engine for driving the growth of commerce around the world. But with mostly monolithic apps written years ago, the IBM i installed base isn’t well positioned to be a major player. However, there are alternative pathways into the API Economy for IBM i shops, if they know where to look.
The API Economy refers to the idea that, by exposing bits and pieces of our internal systems out to the world through well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) – which usually manifest REST-based Web services, although SOAP and XML files will work …
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State Of IBM i Security: Seven Areas That Demand Attention
April 24, 2017 Alex Woodie
The latest installment of the annual State of IBM i Security was released last week by HelpSystems, and the results were about what you would expect: most IBM i servers are basically wide open for abuse.
In a webinar last week, HelpSystems director of security technologies Robin Tatam discussed the findings of the report, which was based on security assessments conducted on 332 systems during 2016. He broke the findings down into seven core areas that should be addressed, including system security levels; administrative privileges; passwords and user profiles; data and program permissions; network access and exit programs; audit trails; …
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Linoma Climbs the File Transfer Ladder
February 22, 2017 Dan Burger
Linoma Software has taken its managed file transfer software up another notch with its latest release of GoAnywhere Version 5.4.2. The basic aptitude of managed file transfer (MFT) products cover the secure and automated transfer of files inside and outside of organizations. That includes sharing data among the various platforms from IBM i to Windows, Linux, Unix, mainframe, and Mac OS.
With its latest refresh, Linoma‘s GoAnywhere updated its SSL cipher configuration picklist for the admin server, HTTPS/AS2 server, FTP server and FTPS server. Just six weeks ago, SOAP and RESTful Web Services were added with the introduction of …
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A Power Systems Wish List For The Year Ahead
January 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is the beginning of a new year and that means a bunch of different things. First, we are not quite as rested as we would like, but we are also ready to get on with it. It usually means that people are making resolutions to change their own behavior for the better and making prognostications about what may or may not happen in the future.
Sometimes we are not in a mood to prepare or predict, and as this year gets rolling I am in much more of a mood to prescribe. Sometimes, you can’t wait for the future …
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Don’t Be the Eeyore of Digital Progress, OpenLegacy Says
June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie
The Internet continues to present powerful and compelling new capabilities that many organizations are leveraging to their advantage. But all too often, the tantalizing digital future remains out of reach for IBM i and mainframe shops due to the difficulty–either real or imagined–of engineering those new capabilities to work with legacy systems. Helping organizations overcome those challenges is one of the goals that OpenLegacy has set for itself.
OpenLegacy CTO Hans Otharsson has spent most of his career working with enterprise systems, including banking systems running on IBM i servers and mainframes, and knows firsthand the massive amount of ingenuity,
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A Change Of Heart: IBM i Shops More Willing To Share
March 7, 2016 Dan Burger
On the road from the AS/400 to IBM i, there have been many changes. One of the biggest has been the evolution from being a fortress that locked out all “outsiders” to allowing the system to interact with other systems. I don’t doubt there are some one-dimensional IBM i shops, but sharing data, once punishable by death, now occurs without beads of sweat and loss of sleep . . . most of the time.
The IBM i platform has a strong record of being directly accessible to other platforms, especially within the Windows realm, Mike Sansoterra points out. Sansoterra is
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HelpSystems’ Application Integration Begins With GUI
November 16, 2015 Dan Burger
Almost every IBM midrange shop faces integration issues. The next piece of the IT puzzle has to fit in with existing environment, or the system that was functional 15 years ago requires modernization to make it functional today and into the foreseeable future. You’re lucky if you are only dealing with one piece of the puzzle at a time. In fact, that rarely happens. You have to sort through a pile of priorities and make a plan. You need a road map.
Integration lessons come in all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes we learn quickly and
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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.