• What’s New in IBM i 7.2–At a Glance

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  There’s a whole bunch of new stuff in IBM i 7.2, which IBM formally announced last Monday and actually shipped on Friday. Together with the new Power 8 servers and other major software product releases, these are exciting times in the Power Systems and IBM i community. Here you’ll find a quick, 30,000-foot view of last week’s announcements. IBM made hundreds, if not thousands, of additions and changes to the core IBM i OS with version 7.2. At a high level, the biggest enhancements include: The i means business. Security boost in DB2/400 through addition of row and column access

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• m-Power Brings 2FA to Web Apps

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Web applications built using mrc‘s m-Power development tool can now supplement password protection with two-factor authentication, the company announced from the COMMON conference in Florida. The Heartbleed vulnerability in the OpenSSL encryption library has shocked the world by compromising many of people’s supposedly secure and encrypted sessions over the past two years. Users who thought their transactions were secure were actually exposed, putting all of their sensitive passwords at risk. The Heartbleed episode has given new thrust to alternative authentication mechanisms. The folks at mrc have responded by announcing that applications built with its m-Power tool can support two

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• Kisco Hooks SafeNet Into IBM’s SIEM

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Kisco Information Systems is shipping a new release of its IBM i exit point security solution that hooks into IBM‘s QRadar security information and event management (SIEM) offering. The integration will enable SafeNet/i customers to get a more complete picture of attempts to compromise perimeter defenses. SafeNet/i is a network security tool that locks down potentially dangerous routes of access to the IBM i server, such as SQL, ODBC, and FTP connections. The software logs all exit point activity, and also uses IBM journaling to keep an irrefutable log of any configuration changes made to the security tool itself.

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• Remain Ties TD/OMS Into IBM’s Rational Team Concert

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software this week announced new integration points between its IBM i change management solution, TD/OMS, and IBM‘s Rational Team Concert offering, which also provides elements of change management for IBM i environments. Remain says the integration between the two products, which becomes available this month, is designed to give customers more choice and flexibility in how they develop, test, and deploy IBM i applications. “Our goal is to give them choice and let them decide what is the best way to manage their applications’ lifecycle,” Remain managing director Marco Kok says in a press release. “IBM RTC is

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• Raz-Lee Rolls Out Business-Item Capture Solution

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security today formally unveiled a new release of its audit-oriented Capture product at the COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida. Called Capture with Business-Items, or CBI, the software takes shots of users’ 5250 screens, while recording specific details such as customer and account numbers. Raz-Lee first unveiled its Capture+++ product in the spring of 2004 to fill the need for screen monitoring capabilities in regulated industries, such as banking, insurance, and healthcare. The software would capture screens when specific criteria were met, such as attempts to sign-in with a certain user ID a certain IP address is accessed. With CBI,

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• CNX Debuts AutoCode Tool at COMMON

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  CNX today unveiled a beta of Nitro AutoCode, a new tool that allows developers to create basic inquiry and file maintenance applications quickly using a simple wizard-driven process. The new offering, which the company introduced at the COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida, builds on the recently released Valence 4.0 framework. Nitro AutoCode is all about speed. The company claims that, in a matter of seconds, a developer can create a complete Valence application using the graphical drag and drop designer. The completed application can be either a file maintenance/inquiry or the beginning of a more complex app. “I’m really excited

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• Mincron Goes GUI and Mobile with LANSA

  May 6, 2014 Dan Burger

  Mincron is an old school IBM ISV with its roots reaching back to the days of the System/38 and green screen applications with RPG lineage. It’s a niche ERP software vendor serving the durable goods wholesale industry. In the beginning, the suite of applications were all green screen all the time. Then came the day when Mincron executives realized the world was moving beyond text-based data presentation. “We started in the late ’90s to modernizing apps,” says Greg Neal, the IT director at Mincron. “This is not quite one of those stories about how it took a thousand tries to

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• BCD Rides Demand for Scrollable Grids to RPG OA

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  BCD Software yesterday rolled out a new release of Presto–its IBM i application modernization tool–that now supports IBM‘s RPG Open Access technology. Developing a handler for the RPG OA technology enables BCD to support scrollable grids in Presto, which is something that wasn’t feasible before, the company says. RPG Open Access was introduced by IBM four years ago to provide a more modern way to consume data from RPG applications. The technology, which is technically known as Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, enables developers and software vendors to bypass the 5250 data stream and instead feed data directly from

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• Looksoftware Introduces Open Access to COBOL Development

  May 6, 2014 Dan Burger

  Time reveals all secrets. RPG Open Access is a good example. It didn’t take long for COBOL developers to hear about RPG OA and soon they began asking for an Open Access of their own. So this week, looksoftware, one of the early pioneers in RPG OA, is adding Open Access for COBOL to its product line, which has had a singular RPG orientation up to this point. What’s good for RPG is good for COBOL. Makes sense. Open Access for COBOL was something IBM talked about as a potential project, says looksoftware product manager Eamon Musallam. “The level

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• Halcyon Adds Forecasts to IBM i Job Scheduler

  May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Finding quiet time can be a challenge in today’s fast-pace corporate environment, for people and servers. With the version 12 release of Halcyon Software‘s Advanced Job Scheduler, system administrators get a new forecasting feature designed to easily find lulls in the IBM i job schedule in which to run reports or apply updates. The company also used the COMMON conference to unveil features to its new WebSphereMQ offering. The new job forecaster gives administrators an extensive view into all the jobs that Advanced Job Scheduler has slated to run. That view extends wide–to encompass jobs across multiple IBM i

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