• InterForm Launches Embedded PDF

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  The big “turducken” craze has passed, to the great relief of responsible foodies and heart surgeons everywhere. But the business IT equivalent of turducken–stuffing business documents inside of other business documents–is just taking off. IBM i document management software vendor InterForm is one of the first companies to take advantage of the new capability in the PDF standard that enables users to literally stuff other documents–including Word docs, TIFFS, XLS spreadsheets, or other PDFs–right into a PDF. InterForm CEO Peter Sørensen says the new Embedded PDF software will be a big timesaver for accounting departments that are constantly fetching old

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• IBM Ships a Fix for Bugs in RDP 8.5

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week issued a fixpack for Rational Developer for Power Systems (RDP) that addresses some of the shortcomings that developers have complained about with RDP version 8.5, a major new release of the IDE that was released earlier this year. In particular, Fixpack 1, or RDP version 8.5.1. If the complaints that RDP users posted to the Midrange.com mailing list are any indication, RDP 8.5 was an exceptionally buggy release. Users posting to WDSCI-L (the product was formerly the WebSphere Developer Studio Client) complained about a number of problems with the integrated development environment (IDE). One of the most

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• IBM i Support Through 2025? Hold On Just a Second

  December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Steve Will, IBM‘s chief architect for the IBM i platform, raised a few eyebrows during his presentation to close the COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) meeting in Rochester, Minnesota, last Friday. After Will put up a slide that showed a future release of the IBM i OS being supported through the end of 2025, several audience members posted Twitter messages about it. However, in his blog yesterday, Will said to not take the slide at face value. While it’s abundantly used in the IBM i marketplace, Twitter hasn’t been an especially fruitful avenue for dispensing actual news that affects

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• You Have The Right To Remain Online

  December 3, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” . . . And access to the Internet. We should probably cut our Founding Fathers some slack on not including our right to surf the Web in the Declaration of Independence, but according to a new survey conducted by the Internet Society, access to the Internet should be considered a basic human right. The Global Internet User Survey gathered responses from more than 10,000

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• Going Mobile With Power Systems Feeds And Speeds

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to get your hands on the slots and watts and feeds and speeds of the Power Systems line, it turns out that there’s an app for that. And it doesn’t run on just Apple smartphones, either. It is called the Power Systems Quick Reference mobile app, and it was created by Velti, a mobile marketing company founded in 2000 in Greece. The Power Systems quick reference app comes in three versions: One for the Blackberry, one for the Apple iOS smartphone, and one for Android smartphones. I downloaded the app from the Google Play app catalog

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• IBM Extends And Tweaks Power Systems Deal In Europe

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has made a number of tweaks to a long-running deal that has been effect on Power Systems iron in Europe. Actually, it made a bunch of tweaks in the past several months, but they were just not obvious to us here at The Four Hundred up here in the Big Apple. (That would be me alone. Ah-hem.) In announcement letter ENUSZA12-1003, you can see all of the changes in the 2012 Power Trade In Program, which was extended to run until December 31 of this year back in July when the PowerLinux 7R2 machine was added

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• A BI On IBM i Partnership Blooms

  December 3, 2012 Dan Burger

  Executives love the idea of business intelligence. The promise is that it can quickly provide dividends, but that rarely happens. Why is that? In IBM midrange shops, the situation is no different than anywhere else. IT departments are understaffed and overworked. It doesn’t take a genius to see that when new projects are added someone has to have the time to implement them. The path to completed projects is often paved by service companies. The recent partnership between Coglin Mill and GEMKO is a good example. Coglin Mill is has an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool called RODIN for

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• IBM To Charge For Lapsed Hardware Maintenance

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years now, IBM has charged a maintenance after license fee if you have a bit of its software that you have let fall off Software Maintenance. This after license fee is basically back maintenance that IBM thinks it is entitled to because you didn’t help pay for the support costs for a period of time, but now you want all of the cumulative benefits of Software Maintenance again. Now, IBM is going to do a similar thing with hardware maintenance, and it is called a “reestablishment fee,” hyphen not included. As you can see in announcement letter 612-042

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• Excepting X86 Iron, Server Sales Continue To Slip In Q3

  December 3, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It might be better for all parties concerned in the server racket if they didn’t stagger their new processor releases over the course of a year. But server processors are an increasingly complex thing to develop, the fabrication plants that make them are increasingly more expensive, and vendors have to slow down, get it right, and milk each chip generation for all it is worth. When the economy is running a little cool and chip makers are all in the middle of processor transitions, it is generally not going to cause server sales to go up. The late summer and

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• As I See It: How IT Decided The Election

  December 3, 2012 Victor Rozek

  In retrospect, analyzing wars to determine the exact tipping point for the victorious side is tricky business. There are multiple battles and often multiple fronts. Strategic decision making, tactical challenges, advantages in weaponry, motivation of the fighting force, and a hundred other factors all play a part. As, sometimes, does chance. Just deciding if divine favoritism played a part would be a subject of testy debate, although that advantage is usually claimed by the winner. The aftermath of elections loosely resembles the aftermath of wars, at least in the extensive postmortem analysis. Where victory and defeat are concerned, both sides

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