Get IBM i Work Management And Security Skills In Under A Week

May 7, 2012 Jenny Thomas

Just because the IBM i has been around awhile doesn’t mean there aren’t new operators coming to the platform in need of education on how to better utilize its power. And it’s probably safe to assume there are even a few experienced operators out there who could use a brush-up on the basics.

In today’s workplace, where budgets are tight and headcounts are small, employees often have to dive in and learn on the job. So when time and money can be made available for training, companies want to know their employees are coming back with skills that can be put immediately to use.

Enter Manta Technologies, a 17-year-old training company specializing in all subjects related to the IBM i, and it is a new four-and-a-half-day class covering two key system administration topics: work management and IBM i security.

Bill Hansen, co-founder of Manta, said demand for this class exists already.

“Students who have taken our operations and systems management boot camp have been asking about the next step,” Hansen explained. “This class is it.”

The boot camp Hansen is referring to, which IT Jungle told you about last year, covers basic i concepts, connectivity products, operations, system management tasks, and virtualization technologies. “Students from that class have the basic operator and system admin skills,” Hansen said, “and now this new course will give them everything a new system administrator needs to know.”

And he would know. Hansen is no stranger to educating IBM i operators. He began his career as a computer operator and programmer, while also teaching IT at the college level. Eventually he began developing multimedia programming courses for businesses, creating the first computer-based training courses for IBM systems in 1985. He and his business partner, John Todd, created Manta in 1994 to bring their courses to the AS/400 marketplace.

The first two days of the new week-long class will focus on teaching students how to perform key work management tasks required for an IBM i system. Training begins with a detailed discussion of system values. Students will also learn how to create and manage subsystems, job descriptions, classes, and output queues. Managing journals and enabling the job accounting capabilities of the IBM i system will also be covered. Students will take away techniques for streamlining IBM i operations, including scheduling jobs automatically, having the system automatically respond to selected messages, having commands entered automatically at IPL, and creating simplified versions of IBM i commands. The second day ends with a discussion of how to monitor and tune the system performance.

Beginning on day three, the focus turns to the security facilities that are built into the IBM i operating system at three levels: physical security, user profile security, and resource security. Student will learn how to select the best security mechanism for a given security requirement, and how to use IBM i commands and panels to establish and modify security plans, and to create an execution environment for an application system.

The class winds up with a discussion of single sign-on, and students will leave knowing how to implement a single sign-on for a network containing systems running both Windows and IBM i.

The work management and IBM i security seminar costs $2,595 per person. Students can also enroll for just the work management component or the security component for $1,295. Detailed class information and registration information is available at the Manta web site, or call Manta at 800-406-2682.