• IBM i Groups Cautiously Adding In-Person Events To Schedules

  February 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Nearly one year after the novel coronavirus reared its nasty head in the United States, shutting down large swaths of the economy and forcing hundreds of millions of people to shelter at home, there is the hint of a glimpse of a ray of sunshine: The possible return of in-person events in the IBM i community. Maybe, anyway. Or maybe not.

  While nothing is certain in these unprecedented, topsy-turvy times, it appears that several IBM i groups are planning to host physical events where actual humans will be allowed to congregate with other humans for the purpose of learning about …

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• POWERUp Delivers A Virtual Shot in the IBM i Arm

  September 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The COVID-19 pandemic may have caused COMMON to cancel its in-person conference – twice – but it couldn’t stop the group from bringing the IBM i community closer together. Thanks to modern video conferencing technology and the last-minute efforts of volunteers and staff members, COMMON pulled off what may be the group’s most unique annual meeting in its 60-year history.

  COMMON president Larry Bolhuis certainly earned his keep as the head of the national IBM i user group during the tumultuous past six months. The leader, who doesn’t actually get paid for his work with the Chicago, Illinois-based organization, helped …

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• Here’s What’s In the Latest IBM i Technology Refreshes

  April 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM today officially unveiled its spring Technology Refreshes for IBM i. Among the goodies that will become available for IBM i 7.4 TR2 or IBM i 7.3 TR8 (or both) are enhancements to Db2 Mirror, a new approach to tape library virtualization, improvements to open source, and new features and functionality around Db2, RPG, RDi, and security, too.

  Months ago, IBM execs circled April 14 on their calendars as the day for the big IBM 7.4 TR2 and IBM i 7.3 TR8 reveal, with the idea that the following week’s POWERUp conference in Atlanta, Georgia (now canceled, but …

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• The IBM i Community Adapts To The New Normal

  March 30, 2020 Alex Woodie and Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we enter the third week of the unprecedented coronavirus lockdown that has shut down large swaths of our country, IBM i shops are adapting to the “new normal” along with everybody else. For essential employees in certain industries, that means working in an uncertain and potentially hazardous environment, while for the rest of us, it means telecommuting from home.

  If you work in finance or insurance along the two coasts, chances are good your headquarters has been closed down and your colleagues sent home to work remotely from laptops, smartphones, and PCs. But if your company makes or moves …

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• Coronavirus Takes Its Toll On The Midrange

  March 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i midrange community has lived through a lot: hurricanes, fires, global recessions, and even terrorist attacks. And now it can add “viral pandemic” to the list of external events impacting the day-to-day operations of IBM i shops around the world, not to mention the cancellation of nearly all in-person meetings and conferences for the next two months.

  As the national reels from the spread of the novel coronavirus and the pneumonia-like disease that it causes, the IBM i midrange community has been forced to make substantial changes to its daily operations. For many office workers, that means forgoing …

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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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• PTC Completes Database Support In Implementer

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As a change management tool, PTC’s Implementer is well-regarded among IBM i users for its ability to track development tasks and smooth out the promotion process. While the product has mostly been used to track source code in programming languages like RPG and Java, customers have increasingly been putting business logic into Db2 for i. With the recent launch of Implementer 12.3, PTC has wrapped up planned enhancements for the database.

  PTC‘s Implementer provides a full range of capabilities for managing development processes for IBM i shops. The software works closely with IBM‘s Rational Developer for i (RDi) …

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• Evermore A Community Of Common Interest

  May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you write as much as I do, and for as long as I have, you can accidentally get caught in a path of your own making that you have forgotten you have cut through the woods before. With the POWERUp 2019 conference coming up next week, formerly known as COMMON, I have a lot of things on my mind, particularly with the passing last month of Hesh Wiener, the founding editor of The Four Hundred, and of the passing last August of Dan Burger, our executive managing editor.

  It is not a coincidence that the opening …

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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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• Public Cloud Dreaming For IBM i

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Is the IBM i community suffering from a bad case of cloud envy? While we profess to love our servers, it’s difficult to sit by and watch as our Windows and Linux colleagues tap into unlimited storage and compute resources offered by public cloud vendors. Maybe that will all change in 2019, but it’s not looking likely.

  Public cloud vendors have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers around to world to house scads of cheap X86 servers and storage resources. Tens of thousands of companies have moved some or all of their computing stacks into …

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