• Midrange Dynamics Hooks CM Into VSCode

  May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Developers using VSCode to create native IBM i applications can now use Midrange Dynamics’s change management (CM) software to properly track their work. Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) announced at the recent POWERUp conference in Denver, Colorado. MDNA says Midrange Dynamics will also support Merlin in the future.

  Demand for VSCode is currently booming among the IBM i installed base, who have been clamoring for a speedier alternative to IBM’s sluggish fat client, Rational Developer for i (RDi), for a long time. Thanks to Liam Allan and his Code for IBM i extensions, which enables ILE languages in the lightweight, …

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• An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023

  April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.

  And work, of course. …

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• IBM Welcomes COMMON Advisory Councils to Rochester

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  One of the hallmarks of a good company is listening to customers. A company may not do everything that its customers wish, but it must show that it’s listening to maintain the relationship. This dynamic was in play during an IBM i meeting that took place last month in Rochester, Minnesota, between IBM and the advisory councils for both COMMON North America and COMMON Europe.

  The three-day meeting that took place November 14 through 16 involved a handful of members from the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) as well as the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC). Both advisory councils had …

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• 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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• 2019: An IBM i Year To Review

  December 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  And. . . stop! Put down your pencils, class. The test is over. We have made it through another year. Well, okay, we have almost made it through most of this year. But with just two weeks left, now is the time to wrap it all up and revisit the biggest IBM i stories to make news in the year that was 2019.

  It all started back in January, when…

  IBM jacked up the prices on IBM Lab Services engagements by more than 10 percent. Whereas it used to cost $3,125 per day to have the benefit of an IBM …

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• Cloud Walkers Makes LPARs More Native On IBM i

  December 16, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are a few different technologies that have been grafted onto the OS/400 and IBM i platform from the outside that are just architected differently from and run somewhat counter to the integrated nature of that platform, and all of them are involved, in one way or another, with managing logical partitions on the Power Systems platform and all of them make IBM i shops cranky.

  They are, in no certain order: the PowerVM hypervisor, the Hardware Management Console (HMC), the Virtual I/O Server (VIOS), the PowerVC variant of OpenStack that is native to Power Systems, and external disk arrays, …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster HA/DR And Security

  October 28, 2019 Alex Woodie

  High availability, disaster recovery, and security are more important than ever, as enterprises look for ways to eliminate risks to their operations, applications, and data. To that end, it’s not surprising that IBM bolstered the HA/DR and security capabilities in IBM i with the latest Technology Refreshes that are slated to begin shipping November 15.

  Let’s start with the new HA features in Db2 Mirror for IBM i, the new business continuity offering that implements an active-active database cluster atop two unique IBM i logical partitions. Db2 Mirror, you’ll remember, was delivered with IBM i version 7.4, so it’s …

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• You’ve Still Got Friends In High Places

  September 23, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past 25 years, and across a total of 78 meetings over that time, the Large User Group, or LUG as it is known, has been helping Big Blue keep the AS/400 and IBM i platform on the right track for the very large enterprises that have the system as their platform for running the mission critical applications that are at the heart of the business. The LUG has put forward thousands of requirements to IBM – both things that the organization wants IBM to do and other things that it wants IBM to stop doing – and …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• Why You Should Join A Local User Group?

  February 4, 2019 Dawn May

  Here’s a good question: Why should you want to join a local user group?

  You can communicate with colleagues via email or instant messages. A wide array of social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, provide a way to share information. Internet searches allow you to find documentation and articles. While the interconnected world provides access to large amounts of information, you also have to determine if the information you find is accurate. Of course, you can trust information from IBM web sites, but what about posts on social media? Are they always right? I’m sure you’ve heard …

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