• LUG Looks to Grow Membership

  June 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you work at a large IBM i shop and are interested in having more of a say in the direction of the platform, then you might be interested in joining the influential Large User Group (LUG). And as luck would have it, the group, which is meeting in Rochester next week for the first time in three years, has several openings in its rolls and is looking for new members.

  LUG got its start back in 1994, when IT executives from six big AS/400 shops got together at a COMMON conference and realized they had a common set of …

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• POWERUp Brings IBM i Base Back Together in the Big Easy

  May 25, 2022 Alex Woodie

  After two years of lockdowns and Zoom calls, IBM i professionals were joyful to be face to face with fellow users this week at the POWERUp conference in New Orleans. The celebration lasted all week, and spilled over onto Bourbon Street at times, but that didn’t get in the way of the primary mission: Getting educated on IBM i. And with the latest enhancements, there was a lot to learn.

  For many POWERUp 2022 attendees and ISVs, COMMON’s annual conference is the first physical event they’ve attended since the pandemic started back in March 2020. With the easing of …

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• COMMON Set for First Annual Conference in Three Years

  May 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but COMMON is about to hold its first annual conference in three years. Starting on Monday in New Orleans, POWERUp 2022 will be the biggest gathering of the IBM i community since the pandemic started more than two years ago. There is still time to register for the conference, which will feature a raft of presentations on the newly released IBM i version 7.5.

  COMMON’s annual conference scheduled for the New Orleans Marriott next week is shaping up to be a good one. More than 100 speakers are scheduled to present more than 300 sessions on …

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• Announcement Day: IBM Lifts The Veil On IBM i 7.5 And 7.4 TR6

  May 3, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue today announced IBM i version 7.5, the first new version of the operating system in three years. Among the big new features with this release are enhancements to Db2 Mirror, better security configurations, and new database features. A new modernization framework called Merlin and a new IBM i subscription option were also unveiled by IBM, which also announced IBM i 7.4 Technology Release 6.

  One of the big headlines with the IBM i 7.5 announcement is Merlin, which IBM says stands for the Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration. Merlin provides a lightweight, browser-based development environment for creating new …

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• Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.

  To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.

  The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …

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• IBM Delivers a Db2 Mirror Update

  January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM updated its Db2 Mirror continuous availability solution last month with support for ObjectConnect, which shrinks the amount of disk space required to copy objects from one IBM i server to another. It also updated the high-speed networking protocols at the heart of the Db2 Mirror solution, which should improve the security of data flowing over networks and makes Db2 Mirror clusters more feasible over longer distances.

  IBM has provided ObjectConnect commands on the IBM i server for years as a way to replicate IBM i objects. The software is useful because it improves the efficiency of copy operations by …

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• Consider Modernizing Your Approach to IBM i Security, Too

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Many IBM i users are facing the reality that they need to modernize their IBM i applications, especially those based on monolithic blocks of fixed-format RPG. But other aspects of the IBM i experience can use some renovating too, including how organizations manage their security settings. Luckily, in the last few Technology Refreshes to IBM i, IBM has provided a slew of new SQL-based services for doing just that.

  Traditionally on IBM i, administrators had two main approaches for viewing and changing security settings. They could view and control the settings directly using commands, often automated through CL programs. Or …

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• Various Power Systems Updates And Tweaks

  October 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While many IBM i shops have a lot of their core applications on that platform, there are lots of shops that deploy Windows Server for adjacent databases and applications and in other cases some shops have AIX or Linux as well. Windows Server doesn’t run on Power iron, of course, which we have always thought was a shame and still is almost two decades since Windows had a brief showing on Power before Microsoft and IBM pulled the plug.

  But the important thing, here in 2021, is that customers have alternatives if they need certain applications and they want to …

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• Db2 PTF Group Enhancements Target Web Services, Audit Journal

  October 4, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It is indisputable that the Db2 for i database is the beating heart of the IBM i platform. There were no earthshattering enhancements to this database in the latest batch of Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 that IBM announced and shipped last month. But there were a few items worth mentioning that shipped in the Db2 PTF Group, including new HTTP commands for calling the database via REST and new SQL-based commands for querying the security audit journal.

  The top new Db2 for i feature arguably is the new set of functions for HTTP requests to consume …

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• For The Prices They Are A-Changin’

  October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.

  Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …

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