Dan Burger
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A Fresche Emphasis On Services
June 19, 2017 Dan Burger
How does your organization plan its IT roadmap? If that roadmap includes implementing new technologies and modernizing legacy systems while staffing has been set at maintenance mode levels, your choices are to hire additional staff, admit the roadmap goal is unattainable, or contract the work to be done by a company with experience helping organizations meet their needs with expertise for hire.
The decision is not an easy one regardless of how easy it may seem to offload your problem onto someone else’s shoulders. Trusting a professional service provider with specific experience in what you need may seem like an …
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Maxava iFoundation Grants Available; IBM i Community Benefits
June 14, 2017 Dan Burger
When it comes to investments in the IBM i community, the leading-by-example philanthropy of Maxava, now in its seventh year, has hit the target of making meaningful change. The company’s iFoundation has put funds in the hands of local user groups where it encourages IBM i professionals to become active in the community and get people thinking and moving and becoming more connected and more engaged.
Maxava just confirmed another $50,000 to fund foundation grants to local user groups that promote training and education in IBM i technology. This program reminds me that change is better served by good …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 14
June 14, 2017 Dan Burger
An IT strategy is often a major resource strategy. Where to allocate resources and how much to allocate is a big part of it. When you are the chief architect for IBM i, you set your priorities beginning with the DB2 for i database and work from there. There are competitive strategies to take into account and collaborative strategies as well. In this article, Steve Will talks mostly about the need for collaborative strategies.
You could say open source is an important collaborative strategy for IBM i. There’s a legitimate emphasis in that direction. Building skills and increasing the IBM …
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CTO Praises Open Source, Offers Modernization Guidance
June 12, 2017 Dan Burger
One of the most influential and productive fields of new development is the open source community. Its magnitude is just beginning to be felt. It’s not just people talking about open source development. It’s people doing development and deriving benefit from it. And it’s people using it often times without realizing it.
At the COMMON Annual Meeting last month, I had an opportunity to talk about open source technology with Brendan Kay, chief technology officer at Fresche Solutions, where open source solutions continue to evolve and provide benefits to internal development and the software products that company delivers to …
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Green Screens, Web Enablement, and LANSA
June 7, 2017 Dan Burger
Although there are important lessons to be learned from history, from an IT perspective, building a better future makes more sense than admiring past achievements. Not that there’s anything wrong with hard-won success. But past success does not assure future success. An easy example is a green-screen app that doesn’t translate all that well to a Web environment. Some require more modification than others to be effective in a Web environment.
The transition from green screens to browser-based applications has caused more chins to be rubbed than a dull razor attack on five o’clock shadow. It’s also caused IBM i …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 7
June 7, 2017 Dan Burger
An IT strategy is often a major resource strategy. Where to allocate resources and how much to allocate is a big part of it. When you are the chief architect for IBM i, you set your priorities beginning with the DB2 for i database and work from there. There are competitive strategies to take into account and collaborative strategies as well. In this article, Steve Will talks mostly about the need for collaborative strategies.
You could say open source is an important collaborative strategy for IBM i. There’s a legitimate emphasis in that direction. Building skills and increasing the IBM …
Read more -
The App Dev World According To Gapp
June 5, 2017 Dan Burger
Somewhere in the tangle of business requirements and IT capabilities is the elusive goal of developing applications that perform well regardless of the device they run on. Can IT provide the user experience that meets the ever-changing business needs and users’ expectations? The answer, in many instances, is “not exactly.”
The evolution of business applications has created many distractions, disruptions, and dissatisfactions. In some organizations, the evolution is ignored – nothing changes. In other organizations, shadow IT worms its way into departments that operate outside centralized control creating disparate degrees of lunacy and sorrow. Steve Gapp has seen it all …
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BCD Presto Mobilizes Green Screen To Web App Dev
May 24, 2017 Dan Burger
Not every green-screen RPG application needs to be modernized. Some need it more than others. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The same can be said for desktop apps. They don’t all have to be capable of rendering on mobile devices, but some need it more than others. Now BCD Software is helping in the decision making process by bringing responsive development capabilities to its version 7 release of Presto.
Presto, of course, is BCD’s most popular modernization tool, while responsive design is the capability to design Web pages that display on any device desktop or mobile with a single …
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Four Hundred Monitor, May 24
May 24, 2017 Dan Burger
What’s more popular than a barbeque on a summer weekend? That’s easy. Steve Will, IBM i chief architect at the COMMON Annual Meeting. In his “You and i” blog, the Chief writes about the fun and the fundamentals of an IBM i technical conference.
Proof that what goes around comes around is the chatter these days about running IT as a business. That means IT needs to make money not spend it. And do you know the top reasons for employees leaving their jobs? Hint: It’s not the money. One more thing . . . IT service providers are coming …
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Investment In IBM i Leads To Innovation Award
May 22, 2017 Dan Burger
Running the company website on the IBM i is one of those ideas that demonstrates how people get in their own way by creating phantom obstacles. Without thinking much about it, the default website decision often is “put it on the Windows or Linux server.” Regrettably, the default setting doesn’t always yield the best results.
Evidence to that effect is the work done by the Grand Rapids Association of Realtors. Migrating their website from a Windows server to their IBM i, on close examination, was a smart choice for several good reasons. Lower cost of operation, a content management system …
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