FHS Volume: 5 Archives - Page 12 of 20

CCSS Boosts Problem Resolution in QMessage Monitor

May 24, 2005 Alex Woodie

iSeries shops will benefit from faster and more accurate technical support as a result of a new feature that CCSS announced last week. Instead of requiring administrators to manually describe what has gone wrong with the OS/400 server, the new URL-linking feature in QMessage Monitor version 6 provides technical support with hyperlinks that lead them directly to the corresponding support documents for particular iSeries message IDs.

QMessage Monitor is a mature OS/400 message management tool that provides message filtering and notification capabilities for iSeries administrators, among other administrative functions. Instead of manually going through all the various message logs on

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WRQ Improves Security of Terminal Emulation Suite

May 24, 2005 Alex Woodie

WRQ may be in the middle of a merger with longtime cross-town rival Attachmate, but that hasn’t stopped the Seattle company from updating its Reflection suite of terminal emulation software. Last week WRQ unveiled new security capabilities in its software, including support for single sign-on (SSO) and SSL support for OS/400-based file transfers, among other enhancements. In a separate announcement, WRQ revealed a new release of Reflection for Secure IT, which was formerly called F-Secure SSH.

iSeries shops gain several new security capabilities with the new version of WRQ’s Reflection suite. Users will now use the same password to

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Help/Systems New CSI Tracks Down Runaway Jobs

May 17, 2005 Alex Woodie

They gather in the dead of night or at high noon, and strike your server without warning. They are runaway jobs, and left alone, they can quickly consume valuable iSeries storage, and even bring your business to a halt. To identify and resolve these crimes against job temporary storage, Help/Systems introduced a new Critical Storage Investigator (CSI) feature in Robot/SPACE version 2.0, which started shipping yesterday.

When Help/Systems introduced Robot/SPACE 1.0 in 2000, the product was designed to help customers monitor the accumulation of data on AS/400 and iSeries disk and avoid any unpleasant surprises. There is little that OS/400

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Centerfield Puts Mutex Waits on Notice

May 17, 2005 Alex Woodie

The iSeries performance experts at Centerfield Technology are developing a new utility that will help system administrators keep their applications functioning properly by detecting iSeries jobs that have entered mutual exclusion, or mutex, wait states. Mutex conditions, which are commonly used in Java and Unix applications, are increasingly being found in ported OS/400 applications. However, because of the way they work, Mutex waits have the possibility of hurting other jobs, even those that are functioning properly.

During the normal course of business, iSeries administrators should expect to watch their database applications go through various states. As part of their OS/400

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Original Debuts Tool for Testing Lotus Notes Apps

May 17, 2005 Alex Woodie

In the world of software testing, there has never been a way to automate testing of Lotus Notes applications. That is about to change with the introduction of a new version of TestGUI from Original Software. Last week the English software house announced TestGUI 4.0, which Original says is the first and only tool of its kind to automate the testing of Lotus Notes applications.

TestGUI is an automated testing tool designed to enable non technical quality assurance (QA) team members to ferret out bugs and other design glitches affecting Windows GUI applications. Instead of relying on pixel-specific screen

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Expand Simplifies Network Device Management

May 17, 2005 Alex Woodie

Expand Networks yesterday unveiled an updated version of ExpandView, the wide area network (WAN) monitoring software that is also used to manage the company’s WAN optimization devices, called Accelerators. ExpandView 3.0 makes it easier to roll out a large number of Accelerator devices, and also keeps administrators informed of their WAN’s condition with color-coded graphs and charts.

ExpandView is a Java-based program that runs on Windows, Unix, and Linux servers and is designed to help network administrators manage large deployments of Expand Accelerator devices. It is not a difficult task for a person to manually manage up to 15 or

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SSA Delivers New ERP LX Platform for iSeries

May 10, 2005 Alex Woodie

It’s been two-and-a-half years since SSA Global first started talking about plans to converge its growing stable of OS/400-based ERP suites into a single product with a single code base. The company finally delivered on that promise last week when it announced the general availability of ERP LX, a new ERP suite that may look familiar to BPCS users, and which is intended to be the ERP system that the company’s BPCS, PRMS, KBM, PRISM, and Infinium customers eventually migrate to.

Before it became the trendy thing to do in the enterprise software space–before Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP initiated

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LANSA User Conference Puts New App Modernization IDE in Spotlight

May 10, 2005 Dan Burger

Application modernization can make a person’s head spin faster than a propeller-topped beanie in a hurricane. There are many software sources for modernization, including IBM, which puts Big Blue in the position of competing with and trying to appease software vendors that are critically important to the iSeries installed base and to the iSeries ecosystem itself. Sorting though the options, platform interoperability issues, and investment considerations can easily result in information overload.

So on the heels of a major product release that centers on application modernization, LANSA put together its annual dog and pony show for its customers (end

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Scriptura XBOS 4.0 Delivers Flexibility for Business Documents

May 10, 2005 Alex Woodie

It may seem paradoxical, but the old adage “the only constant is change” has some truth to it, especially in business. To survive in today’s turbulent business climate, it’s advisable to continually evolve to meet new demands from customers, suppliers, and the overall competitive landscape. A new version of Inventive Designers‘ XML and Java-based document management software, called Scriptura XBOS, should make it easy for users to keep their stockpile of business documents current with the day’s change.

Scriptura XBOS is a cross-platform suite of software that helps users create, maintain, and distribute business documents and forms in a

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Computer Lab and BOSaNOVA Bolster Thin Clients

May 10, 2005 Alex Woodie

Now that IBM has decided to wind-down non TCP/IP networking and stop selling Twinax adapters for the iSeries, it might be time to bite the bullet and make the move to a TCP/IP and thin client infrastructure, if you haven’t already done so. Luckily, there are many vendors providing Windows and Linux thin client terminals for the OS/400 community. Two of those vendors, BOSaNOVA and Computer Lab International, recently improved their thin client offerings.