• 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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• All i Want For Christmas Is RDi Lite

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  All some IBM i community members wanted for the holidays was RDi Lite. Instead, they’re looking at IBM like the Grinch due to its decision not to offer a free, scaled-down version of the application development tool. What’s more, the community is expressing great displeasure at the manner in which IBM handled the matter through its Request for Enhancement (RFE) process.

  Hassan Farooqi kicked off the campaign for RDi Lite in August 2017, when he posted an RFE on the new IBM developerWorks website that’s designed to facilitate collaboration with its user communities by allowing them to submit ideas for …

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• The Next Performance of Dawn May

  September 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota, Dawn May had dreams of moving to the big city. But life has a funny way of changing the best laid plans, and May ended up spending decades working at IBM’s lab in nearby Rochester. After retiring from Big Blue earlier this year, May is set to start the next phase of her career as an independent consultant.

  May moved out of Rochester in 2011, but even then, she never expected to stay in southern Minnesota for so long. “As a farm girl, I always wanted to move away and become a …

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• LUG Talks About IBM i Priorities

  January 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The Large User Group (LUG) held its first meeting of the year last week at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota. While LUG members use the IBM i platform differently than your average mid-sized company, their experiences, concerns, and vision for the future of the platform are relevant to the community as a whole. We caught up with two LUG members last week to get the low down on the i tech.

  The LUG is a private organization that keeps the identities of its members confidential. Because the overall IBM i ecosystem is relatively small, the LUG requested that IT …

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• 2017: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

  It all started off innocently enough in…

  January

  IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …

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• What Was Discussed At the Big LUG Meeting

  January 25, 2017 Alex Woodie

  About 100 representatives from the biggest IBM i shops in the world are at the  IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, this week for the first of three meetings of the Large User Group (LUG) scheduled for 2017. Judging by the agenda for the week-long meeting, security and storage concerns will dominate the agenda.

  The LUG is one of the most influential user groups in the IBM i community, if not one of the most secretive. The group is composed of about 100 of the biggest companies to use the IBM i server. Their exact names aren’t known, but you can …

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