• Thoroughly Modern: Resizing Application Fields Presents Big Challenges

  February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It sounds so simple. You need to change the size of one or more fields in one or more applications. How hard can that be? Quite time consuming and labor intensive, as it turns out, if you don’t do it right. To get a sense of the issues that companies face as they tweak the fields in their applications, we sat down with Ray Everhart, a product manager at Fresche Solutions, who knows a thing or two about this issue after many decades in the field.

  Timothy Prickett Morgan: Can you tell us a little bit about your experience in …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers

  January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing today.

  Timothy Prickett Morgan: …

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• Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

  December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

  The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

  That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot of IBM i shops …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Driving Your Synon Applications Forward

  November 25, 2019 Chris Koppe

  CA 2E, formerly known Synon and still called that by many, is a highly specialized programming language and a productive 4GL development environment. Used by a small number of IBM i shops, Synon has enabled organizations to rapidly create complex applications and systems that run the core of their business operations. These applications are often homegrown and serve as the backbone of business processing while providing organizations with differentiation against their competition.

  Although Synon applications provide great value, they are inherently difficult to access and share information with the organization. In many cases, these operations ecosystems are 15 to 25 …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What To Pack For The Digital Transformation Journey

  October 16, 2019 Emmanuel Tzinevrakis

  Welcome to a new column called Thoroughly Modern. The name is meant to convey the idea that we need to define the desired – if ever-evolving – end state of our businesses and the people, processes, and programs that encapsulate how everything works when we get there.

  It is a given that everyone understands that digital transformation is sweeping every industry, with incumbents being challenged by upstarts – and each other – as they try to create new and better ways to provide products and services to customers in a modern, digital world. We accept this as a first …

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