• Remain Hooks TD/OMS Into Azure DevOps

  September 28, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software’s change management suite for IBM i, TD/OMS, will soon gain support for Microsoft Azure DevOps, providing another code repository for IBM i shops. The Dutch company has a host of other enhancements for various DevOps products — including a new analytics dashboard for KPIs, enhancements to Octo, and new features for its API product — that it’s looking to deliver with next week’s release of Milestone 1. This company is also working on developing an alternative to IBM’s Merlin.

  Remain delivers updates to its various IBM i DevOps products on a regular cadence that starts in early summer, …

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• IBM Knows Your System, So You Already Know Its Cloud

  September 21, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Tonny Bastiaans, worldwide offering manager for Power Virtual Server at IBM, and Ash Giddings, a product manager at Maxava and an IBM Champion 2022, have been doing a series of joint presentations over the last few months. I recently had a chat with them to get the juice.

  There are a lot of companies that sell hosting, many that sell hosting and call it cloud, and many who have true utility-style cloud computing. But there are very few venerable systems vendors indeed who have long experience in creating full systems to run a diverse set of enterprise applications that also …

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• Guru: The SND-MSG Op Code And Message Subfiles

  September 12, 2022 Ted Holt

  If you’re one of the many IBM i programmers who still writes green-screen applications, think about how your programs communicate with the users. How do you tell a user that a value that he’s just entered is invalid, or that he needs to press a command key to proceed? I’ve seen several methods, but a common one — and my favorite — is to communicate through a message subfile.

  The nice thing about message subfiles is that I can report two or more messages at one time. I like the computer to find as many errors as possible and let …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation

  August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe

  The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.

  This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …

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• Cleo and SrinSoft in Integration-Modernization Link Up

  August 3, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Modernization is a hot topic among organizations that run ERP and industry-specific applications on mature platforms, like the IBM i. But other parts of the stack need modernizing too, including the integration layer, which is the subject of a new partnership between integration software provider Cleo and SrinSoft.

  Cleo provides a range of data and application integration solutions as part of its Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC) offering, which connects to backend IBM i systems. The Rockford, Illinois-based company supports API, EDI (AS2), and file-based integration methods via CIC, which is available in Express, Essentials, Business, and Premium versions.

  SrinSoft, …

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• Highly Secure API Enablement for IBM i

  August 1, 2022 Daniel Magid

  The explosive growth of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) over the past few years has dramatically transformed how business is conducted. APIs allow customers to increase revenue by leveraging new channels to reach their customers; they facilitate cost reduction by automating manual processes and raising an organization’s responsiveness. In many industries, the benefits of APIs are so compelling that it is already impossible to compete or participate in a business supply chain without supporting APIs.

  However, opening up your core IBM i applications to API connections also carries risks. According to the Gartner Group, APIs are rapidly becoming the number one …

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• Profound Logic Shows Off No-Code API for Salesforce

  June 15, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for a way to integrate their Db2 for i data with Salesforce applications may be interested in a new REST API unveiled by Profound Logic last month. What’s more, the vendor says the solution works without writing a single line of code.

  Profound API, which the company launched just over a year ago, is a Node.js-based offering that runs directly in a Web browser. The product contains several editors and a runtime that enables users to define their APIs, test them, manage them as they’re pushed into production, and monitor performance over time. …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Good Security Is Just As Important As Good Code

  June 13, 2022 Pauline Brazil Ayala

  Can my IBM i really be hit with a virus? Can it be hit with ransomware?

  These are the questions I regularly get from clients as a security expert with more than 20 years of experience. With the pervasiveness of these ransomware threats and sophisticated cyberattacks that we’re seeing in recent times, it only makes sense that we pay close attention to these threats.

  Security on the IBM i is a complex topic, and it is not one that is easily tackled with a few bullet points and tweaks of systems settings. Just like programming on the platform, for that …

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• API Operations Management for Safe, Powerful, and High Performance APIs

  May 18, 2022 Daniel Magid

  Now that API enablement for IBM i applications has become mainstream, IBM i users are starting to ask questions around how best to manage API operations. To get the most out of your APIs and to provide your API users with the very best experience, you must:

  • Ensure your APIs are up, running and providing rapid responses.
  • Protect your APIs from attacks, misuse and faulty calls coming from API end users.
  • Have a strategy for creating, deploying and maintaining your APIs over time.

  In other words, you need to make sure that your APIs deliver the same reliability, security, performance …

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• What’s New in IBM i Services and Networking

  May 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM delivered a slew of new IBM i services with the delivery of IBM i 7.5 last week, giving IBM i professionals handle new methods for working with various components of the platform. The new releases of the operating system also brings a number of enhancements in the networking stack, which are notable for several reasons.

  The past several new releases and Technology Refreshes (TRs) have brought new IBM i services, which are SQL-based alternatives to traditional ways of accessing things on the platform like IBM i objects, system information, and other components. At this point, IBM has …

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