Alex Woodie
Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.
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NGS Bolsters Excel Integration in New Release
August 7, 2024 Alex Woodie
As far as legacy IT products go, Excel is right up there. Microsoft launched the spreadsheet tool back in 1985, making it three years older than the venerable IBM AS/400. For companies that run both of those products – well, the IBM i server, anyway – an upgrade of New Generation Software (NGS)’s flagship business intelligence tool will have users singing a happy tune.
While the IBM midrange server is a bit of a niche platform, Microsoft Excel is about as mainstream as you can get. The software is estimated to be used by 750 million people, or about one …
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IBM Launches AI-Powered Security Assistant
August 7, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM this week launched a new AI-based security tool that’s designed to help security professionals who are deluged by data. Dubbed the IBM Consulting Cybersecurity Assistant, the new offering is based on IBM’s watsonx technology and is available (as the name would suggest) to IBM consulting clients.
Security professionals are constantly bombarded with alerts to the point where they are overloaded. A recent survey by CybSafe found that more than 25 percent of security professionals say they’re often or always feeling overwhelmed with information, while another 46 percent say they occasionally feel that way. A 2021 survey by Trend Micro …
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How Polverini Enables End-to-End Testing on IBM i
August 5, 2024 Alex Woodie
Testing is one of the most time-consuming and least glamorous parts of software development. But doing it well is important, as the July 19 CrowdStrike outage so potently reminded us. When it comes to ensuring that IBM i programs are thoroughly tested, a relatively new end-to-end testing solution from Polverini & Partners can potentially take some of the drudgery and error out of the process.
Polverini & Partners recently announced ReplicTest, a new product aimed at automating all aspects of the software testing process on IBM i, including unit testing, acceptance testing, regressing testing, security testing, integration testing, and stress …
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Open Source IBM i Build Tool Now Supports VS Code
July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
A new release of the open source iBuild tool now supports VS Code, the developer of the tool recently announced. The new release also now fully supports ILE, which is critical to the future of the IBM i platform, the iBuild creator says.
iBuild is a free build tool that automates the task of running all of a developer’s RPG source code through the IBM compilers. It’s been in active development for about eight years and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/projects/ibuild.
What makes iBuild unique is that it puts instructions on how to build objects into the header of …
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What’s In the Latest Update to PowerHA
July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
A handful of new capabilities have been released for PowerHA customers over the past few months, including support for asynchronous policy-based replication in FlashSystem, new administrative functions, support for SQL services, and the addition of new management functions in an updated Web interface.
As IBM notes in its announcement letter for IBM i 7.5 TR4, there is a long history of integration between PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i and IBM Spectrum Virtualize, the software for managing IBM FlashSystem SAN arrays. This tradition includes native support in PowerHA for various Spectrum Virtualize replication mechanisms, including Metro Mirror (synchronous replication), Global Mirror …
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InterForm Sells Majority Stake to Private Equity Firm
July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie
InterForm A/S, the Danish output management vendor whose products are resold by Infor and other application vendors, has sold a majority stake of itself to VIA equity, a private equity firm also based in Denmark. InterForm says it will use the investment to accelerate business development around the world.
InterForm A/S has been targeting IBM midrange systems with its output management software since the company was founded back in 1987. While it supports open systems today, it has more than 4,000 installations on IBM i and predecessor systems, which makes InterForm arguably the most heavily used output management system on …
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Fortra Leans On XDR For Full Spectrum Security
July 22, 2024 Alex Woodie
When it comes to security, more is often better. As in, more security professionals running more security products and services that deliver more overlapping coverage of your security weaknesses. The good news for IBM i shops is that Fortra delivers more solutions with more coverage than probably anyone else in the industry, particularly with its XDR solution.
XDR, or extended detection and response, is the state of the art for enterprise security today, and essentially is replacing security information and event management (SIEM) tools at the top of the security food chain, says Tom Huntington, the vice president of technical …
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What’s Cooking In Code For IBM i?
July 15, 2024 Alex Woodie
With IBM beginning to pull back on green screen development tools for IBM i, the importance of Code for IBM i to the IBM i development community has never been greater. The good news is that there’s a lot of development activity at the moment around the Visual Studio Code plug-in, with new features to replace some of the outgoing greenscreen functionality.
IBM announced that it was killing off some of the green screen development tools in its Application Development Toolset (ADTS) as part of its Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 in early May. Among the …
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IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities
July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.
As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …
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Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions
July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie
The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.
“What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to …
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