• Boutique Footwear Company Finds A Great Fit With Node.js

  August 19, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As one of the premier providers of winter footwear in North America and Europe, Kamik knows what it takes to run a successful manufacturing operation. But when its custom RPG-based ERP system started to show its age, the company turned to Node.js to help modernize production systems, and found that it improved application integration and developer productivity along the way.

  “Legacy” is a word that the folks at Kamik can take pride in. Founded in Quebec in 1898, Kamik remains a family owned business to this day, with factories located in Canada and the United States. Through its brand-name and …

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• Cloud ERP for Less than $400 Per Month? Now There’s a Concept

  July 22, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What do you call a full-fledged ERP system running on a private IBM i cloud that costs less than $400 per month for three users? If you’re Software Concepts – the Massachusetts-based ERP vendor behind the bold new deal – you might call it just what the IBM i ecosystem needed.

  The IBM midrange server has always been something of an enigma in the IT business. Tucked between the giant mainframes running Fortune 100 outfits and the PCs favored by one-man shops, the AS/400 and its progeny have catered to midsized organizations that demand advanced business functionality, but not the …

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• Bucking the System: Higher Ed, Hold the College

  June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Jim Buck spent 15 years teaching IBM i and RPG at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Buck achieved great things there, finding hundreds of students good jobs around the country. But ultimately the college experience grew old for Buck, so he ventured out on his own. That’s when he founded his own online IBM i educational company, imPower Technologies.

  That was two years ago, in the spring of 2017. After spending almost a year getting imPower Technologies up and running, Buck is teaching students IBM i and RPG once again. Currently he offers two courses: an introduction to IBM …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• High Schools: The New Recruiting Grounds for IT Jobs

  November 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are having trouble filling entry-level IT jobs due to the tight job market and low unemployment rate may want to check out another resource for finding and attracting workers: their local high school.

  Recruitment, retention, and training of new talent are always hot topics during the roundtable discussions that take place at the CIO Summit. “It’s always a very fruitful and productive topic to see what CIOs are doing,” says Alan Seiden, who has been running the bi-annual event for IBM i tech executives for the past year-and-a-half.

  So when one of the CIOs at last month’s …

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• What A Concept: Distribution Software Aimed At Real SMBs

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time may pass in the IBM midrange, and systems and business practices have evolved, but the one thing that does not change is that some companies, especially those on the smaller size with limited resources to devote to IT hardware and software, want a simple system that just lets them do the work they need to do.

  The simplicity of the System/3X family, which has its start way back with the System/3 in 1969 and runs up through the System/38 in 1979 and the System/36 in 1983, up through the AS/400 in 1988 and up through the iSeries, System i, …

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• Guru: Ready Or Not, Big Changes in RDi V9.6! Part 1, Key Behavior

  February 26, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Version 9.6 of RDi has many new features. If you’ve upgraded your RDi, you have undoubtedly noticed some of the enhancements, because most of the new features are enabled by default. Just in case you’re not a huge fan of some of those features, most can also be disabled to make things work as before if you know where to look.

  In this series, we’ll take a look at some of the new features and how to enable and/or disable them. In this first part, we’ll study two new key behaviors and how to control them.

  Many of the enhancements …

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• Sibley Elaborates on ‘Synergy’ of ILE Compiler Move

  July 12, 2017 Alex Woodie

  When Steve Sibley, the vice president and business line executive for IBM Cognitive Systems, announced a month ago that it’s moving development of its RPG compiler from the Rational group directly into the IBM i development organization, he cited the increase of “synergy” as the main reason for the move. IT Jungle finally caught up with Sibley last week and obtained a more detailed explanation.

  In his June 9 open letter to IBM i customers and partners, Sibley announced that development of the Rational programming tools for IBM i and ILE RPG and ILE COBOL compilers themselves would move into …

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