Dan Burger
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Responsive Design, Node.js Top BCD App Dev Enhancements
May 18, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreIt’s really difficult to overstate the importance of application development to any organization. It’s a simple tool, but it needs to be the right tool. When done right, it’s crucial to business efficiency. Getting it right and keeping it simple is the target, yet somehow the aim differs wildly from the result. Shoot fast but shoot straight. Don’t just hit the target. Hit the bull’s eye.
BCD Software is one of several application development vendors in the IBM midrange market that can help application developers shoot fast and straight. The company has a new release of its desktop and mobile
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Free Form RPG Scores IBM i Innovation Award
May 16, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreFrom the time free form RPG was introduced with IBM i 7.1 TR 7, expectations have been high. There’s been much talk about the potential for greatness, but only scattered reports of success. Finally, free form RPG is lighting up the scoreboard. Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation (AECC) is showing the way. It’s made free form RPG the cornerstone of future development, and its endeavors led to the 2016 COMMON-IBM Power Systems Innovation Award.
The award was presented Sunday at COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Exposition, which just got underway in New Orleans, Louisiana.
AECC is based in Little Rock. It
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AURA Hopes U.S. Modernization Crowd Has Silver Lining
May 16, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreAURA Equipements CTO Sylvain Rubele says he knows of 4,000 IBM i shops that are integrating IBM i native applications within Web or desktop applications that run on Windows, Linux, and Unix operating systems. How does he know this? Because, by his count, they are AURA customers. Eighty percent of those reside in French-speaking European countries. He wouldn’t mind if that number was smaller, if the number of IBM midrange customers in the United States was larger.
With the increasing emphasis on application and database modernization, Rubele expects to do better in that market. But if wishes were fishes, we’d
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See The IBM i Access You Never Heard Of
May 9, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe IBM i development team rolled out Access Client Solutions (ACS) almost three years ago. It remains a work in progress. And that’s a good thing. The IT graveyard is filled with products that were unable to show progress. Before there was ACS, there was Access for Windows. It can still be found in a great many IBM midrange shops, despite having one foot in the grave and no sign of a pulse when it comes to progress.
The pace of progress established with ACS is not blindingly fast, but it’s steady and it’s an indicator of where and how
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BCD, Midrange Dynamics Partner On IBM i Modernization
May 9, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreWhen you think of modernizing applications to increase their efficiency and extend the original investment in the business logic that is so important to your organization, it should be apparent that the process requires some controls and management. It’s a bit like having a map and compass when going into the wilderness. That’s why we’re seeing partnerships form between the application development vendors and the change management vendors. The most recent hook-up is a partnership between BCD Software and Midrange Dynamics.
BCD has created several methods for IBM midrange shops to modify, install, and distribute application changes. For the
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Study Identifies Disturbing IBM i Security Weaknesses
May 2, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreSecurity threats–data breaches with bruising economic consequences that are triggered from within organizations, not outside–are beginning to grab the attention businesses formerly passive about the risks of status quo unpreparedness. Could be just in the nick of time. “We’d be lying if we said breaches were only happening to a small percentage of IBM i systems,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies at HelpSystems and the author of 2016 State of IBM i Security Study.
This is the 13th year for the annual security report that identifies mistakes in system configurations that open the door to a smorgasbord
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Good IBM i Ideas From Wisconsin
May 2, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreOne of IT Jungle‘s touchstone people in the IBM midrange community is Jim Buck. He’s just signed on for his 13th year as president of the Wisconsin Midrange Computing Professionals Association (WMCPA) and his day job is RPG instructor at Gateway Technical College. He is also the co-author of Programming in RPG IV, which is in its fifth edition. Buck knows the IBM i territory, and his experiences are indicators of where we are.
Buck’s WMCPA connections combined with his teaching role at Gateway Technical College have developed into a pipeline of young talent that flows into
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IBM i 7.3: High Time For High Security
April 25, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreHow important is data confidentiality to you? On a scale of one to 10, it should be the only double-digit number you can choose. The risks for those unable to control and protect their information are far greater than ever before. The same thing will be said each year into the foreseeable future. So when looking for innovative ways to protect information, IBM acted by adding a tool called authority collection to the new i 7.3 release.
Call it a tool, a utility, or a capability authority collection is now built into the latest OS. The simplest explanation is that
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Keep An i On Open Source
April 25, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe marriage of open source and IBM i reminds me of a marriage statistic that recently came to my attention: Approximately $6 billion in revenue is lost by American businesses as a result of decreased worker productivity linked to marriage hardship. Employees in a happy marriage, in contrast, tend to increase a company’s bottom line. From what I have seen of IBM i advocates in relationships with open source, happiness seems to abound.
Cross-trained RPG developers boasting open source language skills aren’t exactly common, but their numbers are increasing as IBM i shops with modernization intentions follow through on plans
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IBM i Strategy And Roadmap Loses Business Focus
April 18, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreA white paper is supposed to help readers understand challenges and provide an objective discussion of problems and solutions. It should not be a thinly disguised image enhancement device. Do that once and it rains on all your subsequent white papers. We all would like to see IBM sell more IBM i servers. But after reading the latest white paper on IBM i, it misses the mark of a real white paper.
Let me start by giving you a link where you can download this document titled the IBM i Strategy and Roadmap. I recommend everyone read it. It