• Survey Says: 24 Hours Is The Disaster Recovery Target

  June 20, 2011 Dan Burger

  Disasters make great news. We read and watch these reports of tornados and floods and earthquakes and tsunamis, but even if we take the time to consider what we’d do if a disaster crashed into our lives, those thoughts are fleeting. We settle back into our routines and wait for the next report of a disaster that doesn’t directly affect us. Most IT departments are run with this same attitude. So it was with equal parts amusement and dismay that I examined a survey of IBM i shops conducted by United Computer Group. UCG is a provider of online

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• As I See It: Nostalgic for Normal

  June 20, 2011 Victor Rozek

  “To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.” At least that was psychologist Carl Jung’s dismissive opinion. For something that is hard to define, “normal” gets a bad rap. It’s like being average: everyone wants to be thought of as above average, but not if it means being abnormal. What’s considered normal may simply be a matter of numbers and context. If enough people buy a pink car, we become a pink car nation. If pink cars become obsolete, the next mode of popular transportation becomes normal. Then there are sub-groups that contextually delineate normality. If you’re wealthy,

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• DB2 for i: The Beating Heart of the IBM i Platform

  June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the things I like about Steve Will, the new chief IBM i architect, is that he likes data as much as the rest of us do. When he gives a presentation about the IBM i platform and the Power Systems servers that it runs upon, he isn’t afraid to give you arts and charts and actual information to make a point. And so it is in a recent series of presentations that Will has been giving to the AS/400 faithful regarding IBM i roadmaps and other things. We’ve gone through the roadmaps and the new process for updating

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• KS2 Expands IBM i Managed Services Biz Into Hosting, Co-Lo

  June 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  KS2 Technologies, an IBM reseller based near Dallas, is expanding its managed services business into server co-location and hosting, the company announced last week. Under the new plans, KS2 will manage the complete IBM i environment for its customers, and even house the IBM i server in one of its data centers. KS2 has been in the AS/400 business since it was founded in 1992. About seven years ago, the Grapevine, Texas, company–which is a premier IBM business partner and a member of Arrow Electronics‘ distribution channel–began its JD Edwards practice. Today about 60 percent of KS2’s customers

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• You’re Only As Old As The Programs You Run With

  June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  How does a venerable computer system act its age? Cleverly, I think, and only when asked to. The AS/400, which has had more names than James Garner in The Rockford Files, is still the AS/400 or “the 400” to most of us despite all the pressure of political correctness to adopt the IBM i name for the operating system and to not talk about the hardware platform as anything but a Power Systems platform. As if any old operating system is as good as any other. The truly wonderful thing about that AS/400, which celebrates its 8,400th day as

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• IBM Distributing WSDL2RPG via Integrated Web Services for i

  June 16, 2011 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops getting involved in Web services and the use of Web services description language (WSDL) executables may be interested to know that earlier this year IBM announced the availability of WSDL2RPG, an open source product used to generate RPG stub code from a WSDL file, thereby simplifying the integration of WSDL-based Web services into the IBM i’s ILE environment. On February 17, IBM announced the availability of WSDL2RPG from its Integrated Web Services for i offering Web page at www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/software/iws/index.html. The set of tools, often dubbed WS-i, includes an integrated Web services server based on the Apache

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• LotusLive Adds to Security, Mobile Access, and Cloud Features

  June 14, 2011 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s LotusLive Notes–the email, calendaring, and contact management offering available via a Web browser or a Lotus Notes client in the LotusLive cloud–just added a few new fancy duds to its already extensive business wardrobe. IBM, which is fond of describing Notes as “enterprise ready” and making the implication that its rival, Microsoft Exchange, is something less, continues to put the spotlight on integrated applications designed to simplify and improve everyday business activities. However, with this latest release, LotusLive Notes 1.4, the enhancements come in the categories of user conveniences, which include not only end users but also the

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• Symtrax Delivers New Release of Compleo Layout

  June 14, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Symtrax last week unveiled the second major release of Compleo Layout, a Windows-based forms overlay design tool designed to make it easier for non-technical users to modernize the documents generated by ERP systems. The new release, version 4.11, adds support for barcodes, among other new features. Compleo Layout, which Symtrax announced last August and delivered in December, is the newest component of the Compleo suite, a soup-to-nuts electronic document management solution designed to work with business applications running on IBM i and other platforms. The software gives users a WYSIWYG interface for sprucing up the output of ERP systems, including

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• Attachmate Delivers Reflection for the Web 2011 R1

  June 14, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Attachmate last week unveiled Reflection for the Web 2011 R1, a new release of its Web-based terminal emulation solution for accessing legacy applications on a variety of host platforms. Reflection for the Web 2011 R1 brings several new capabilities to the Web browser, including a new programmatic framework that Attachmate says simplifies the automation of complex business processes, and the capability to record and edit macros and other automations using JavaScript. This release also brings support for the latest Web browsers, including Internet Explorer 9, Safari 5, and Google Chrome. End users will also benefit from a new file transfer

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• Flexera Goes Agile with InstallAnywhere 2011

  June 14, 2011 Alex Woodie

  Flexera Software recently launched InstallAnywhere 2011, the software installation and management utility that helps software developers streamline deployments to multiple operating systems, including IBM i. The new release includes features designed to help developers who have adopted the agile method of development. InstallAnywhere is a popular multi-platform installation utility that’s used by many ISVs around the world. Flexera, which also owns the Windows-oriented InstallShield tool, says more than 70,000 ISVs have used the two products to load software on 550 million PCs around the world. Thanks to support for business-oriented platforms, such as IBM i, Unix, and z/OS, the InstallAnywhere

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