• Better Collaboration And Integration Needed From Doc Management

  April 2, 2012 Dan Burger

  For as long as I’ve been alive, paper has always been called paper. There’s never been Paper 2.0 and to the best of my knowledge no one ever talks about enterprise-level paper or makes claims that it seamlessly integrates with filing cabinets. Compared to stone tablets, it’s an innovation award winner. But has its value diminished in the digital age? No doubt about it. Document management software would love to be Paper 2.0, but paper won’t go away without a fight. I’m not here to defend paper. In fact, just the opposite. So if you’re in love with paper–forms and

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• Progress Being Made In IT Security War, IBM Says

  April 2, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM saw a reduction in application security vulnerabilities, exploit code, and spam last year as system makers and software developers tightened up their code, the vendor says in its latest X-Force report. When that attack surface got smaller, cybercriminals were forced to work their black magic in emerging areas, like social networking and mobile devices. IBM’s semi-annual tally of the state of security identified some promising trends. On the spam front, it found a 50 percent decline in unsolicited commercial email compared to 2010. On the vulnerability front, it found that only 36 percent of previously identified vulnerabilities were still

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• As I See It: You’ve Got Interviews

  April 2, 2012 Victor Rozek

  High traffic websites require a daily supply of new material to entertain the surfing masses. But curing the ills of the terminally jaded requires taking a broad-spectrum antibiotic approach: provide a wide variety of postings as remedy for a wide variety of tastes, from the serious to the vacuous. On Yahoo!, for example, you can find everything from video of the Annual Wife-Carrying Obstacle Race (my wife and my back decided to abstain this year), to Rick Santorum insisting that he doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Sometimes it’s hard to know where vacuous ends and serious begins. On

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• IBM i Versus Oracle JDE Throwdown Redux

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When looking at a complex problem on deadline, you rarely get everything right the first time, or do as thorough a job as you would like. My price/performance analysis of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne “Day In The Life” benchmark test on various Oracle Sparc T and IBM Power Systems and System x iron is no exception. A reader with very intimate knowledge shared a little insight, and I added some more vectors to the comparison. Hi, Timothy: I just read your newsletter article today. It was very thorough as expected from you. I just had a comment to make. We

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• Making A Case For IBM i

  April 2, 2012 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community has never suffered from a lack of advocates. Those who know it best know it to be a highly capable platform with many attributes that make it superior in many ways to other platforms. The Smarter Computing message that IBM has built its marketing message around is IBM i computing. There are innovative businesses around the world proving this. And there are companies that have resisted change riding the old AS/400 horse for far too long with little or no attempt to move with the system into the modern world. The overall perception of the platform

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• IBM’s Next Generation Platform Prepped For Launch

  April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What IBM has been calling its “Next Generation Platform” internally and when talking to business partners that have been briefed in the past several weeks, and what it is calling “expert integrated systems” in its promotions appear to be a warm up for the launch event set for April 11. And it looks very similar in concept to the Flex Platform I caught wind of and told you about back in February. There will be some bigwigs at IBM handling the NGP launch, which will take place in a webcast at 2 p.m. Eastern on April 11: I

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• Just When Do IBM i PTFs Get Applied, Anyway?

  March 28, 2012 Hey, Joe

  Our management has our operators apply cumulative PTFs (CUME) with no regard to when the system will be IPLed. They load the CUME, and the system may not be IPLed until a few weeks later. The managers believe that no PTFs are applied until after the IPL. I think that some PTFs are applied immediately, while others wait for the IPL. What’s the real story on how PTFs are applied? –Dave This is an interesting question. For most shops, PTFs aren’t usually applied until you IPL the system. But in some situations, eligible CUME PTFs can be applied immediately, depending

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• Down with Dependence!

  March 28, 2012 Ted Holt

  ACME Software has just released version 1.0 of the DWIM (Do What I Mean) utility. Placing the DWIM command in your CL programs (or calling the program counterpart from programs written in other languages) will solve all your problems, because the computer will stop doing what you tell it to do and do what you intended for it to do instead. Before you start adding calls to DWIM to your programs, you might want to ponder a few questions. What if ACME Software goes out of business and stops supporting DWIM? What if a competitor comes out with something even

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• A Couple of RSE Quickies

  March 28, 2012 Paul Tuohy

  Believe it or not, there are a few features of RSE that I do not use on a daily basis. When working on my own system, my own projects, and my own development environment, I know where everything is and how to navigate it. But (and I know you are going to find this hard to believe) there are some people who do not share my views on such things as where sources should be kept and, even more shockingly, I have to adapt to their standards when I am working on their systems. Is there no justice? Here are

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• EXTOL Updates ERP Adapters, Enhances AS2 Software

  March 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

  EXTOL International issued updates to its adapters for Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP‘s ERP suite. The Pennsylvania company also updated its AS2 software, and hired a new sales manager. EXTOL is a company that has its roots in EDI and the AS/400, but which has broadened its reach in recent years to support other platforms and business integration methods. Its flagship product today is the Java-based EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI), a multi-purpose suite of integration broker tools that supports IBM i and other major platforms. The company recently updated two of its ERP-specific EBI adapters. The new adapter for

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