• What Is Happening With RFEs For IBM i?

  October 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM customers have been encouraged to vote on product enhancements for over a year as part of the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, and a number of new features have actually made it into IBM i technology refreshes (TRs). What new or improved IBM i functionality will Big Blue work on next?

  It’s hard to say exactly which RFE items will strike a chord with IBM product managers, since the requests can be all over the board and impact a range of components, from the IBM i OS itself and the Db2 for i database to Access Client Solutions (ACS) …

  Read more

• The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

  April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

  Here are the top five new RFEs, …

  Read more

• Top Ten New IBM i RFEs

  May 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM open source its database drivers, or add support for .NET? Should it add the latest SSL ciphers to IBM i 7.1? These are some of the changes that it has received through its new Web-based requests for enhancement (RFE) program on its developerWorks site.

  The new RFE functionality is only a few months old, but it’s already attracting the attention of IBM i professionals who want IBM to change things about the stack. It’s also getting attention from other IBM i pros who get to vote on them.

  Here are the top ten RFEs so far, ranked by …

  Read more

• Vote On New IBM i Functionality With RFE Community Program

  March 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM is rolling out a new program that will not only allow IBM i customers to submit requests for enhancements (RFEs) over the Web, but allow the IBM i community to vote on them. Dubbed IBM RFE Community, the developerWorks program provides another venue for informing the Rochester Lab about a problem or asking them to build a new feature into the IBM i product.

  The new IBM RFE Community program for IBM i, which we told you was coming last August, is based on other RFE programs the company has had in place for other software products. Armed …

  Read more

• What’s Wrong With Modern RPG?

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM continues to enhance RPG. If it wasn’t being improved on a regular basis, there would be cause for concern, but some people find cause for concern in everything. Satisfaction is on the other side of the fence, even after they’ve crossed the fence. That’s not an endorsement for “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” There’s always room for constructive criticism and honest assessments of the circumstances.

  That brings us to the RPG enhancements in the recently announced Technology Refresh identified as IBM i 7.2 TR 6 and IBM i 7.3 TR …

  Read more

• Guru: Got A Great Idea? Tell IBM!

  January 30, 2017 Susan Gantner

  People often talk to me at conferences or via email about ways they wish RDi worked differently, or about a built-in function that RPG should have, or about other changes to IBM products that they think would make life better for IBM i developers. Sometimes I agree that they are great ideas and I wish IBM would implement it, too.

  Sometimes, even if I do think it’s a good idea, I think there are other more important things to be done before that. Occasionally, I struggle to understand why anyone would want that feature. I suspect many of you have …

  Read more

Next Articles