IBM this week officially ships the Nortel Software Communications Systems 500, the new voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system for Power Systems and System i shops with 1,000 users or less. The SCS500 was designed to provide a simple and affordable Internet-based phone system for small and mid size businesses (SMBs) that have neither the resources nor the need for more highly customizable and expensive VoIP systems, including the hugely scalable 3Com offering that also runs on the IBM midrange server.

IBM announced last June that it was working with Nortel on an easy-to-use VoIP offering that made sense

The System i security experts at Raz-Lee have developed a new product called AP-Journal that’s designed to detect fraudulent field-level changes to DB2/400-based application files that could indicate inside fraud. The new tool, which Raz-Lee first unveiled two weeks ago at the COMMON conference in Nashville, Tennessee, is based on IBM journaling and will be most useful for companies in the healthcare and financial services industries, the company says.

One of the most pressing security issues affecting System i shops is that too many organizations grant way too much authority to their users. According to a recent security survey performed

ARCAD Software‘s president and CEO Philippe Magne points to two critical factors that modernization projects need to address. The first is control over the knowledge of existing applications. The second is control over the change process. Certainly not all modernization processes require code changes, but in those instances old code may be a burden on development even after modernization. In Magne’s view, modernization entails moving to a modern environment. It involves modern languages and modern architectures. Anything short of that is a Band-Aid approach.

The flip side is that application modernization that involves modern languages (yes, the current version

BOSaNOVA unveiled a new semi-rugged thin client tablet computer, the Windows-based 410XP BOStablet, at the recent COMMON conference in Tennessee. The Arizona company also upgraded its Linux-based thin clients with new software.

On the ruggedness scale, there is full military grade ruggedness, or IP64, and then there is a state of semi-ruggedness, or IP53. A device that is rated to IP64 means it can withstand multiple drops and the harsh conditions of the battlefield. For less extreme conditions, there is the IP53 rating, which means the unit is resistant to water and dust and can withstand repeated drops from two-and-a-half

System i shops that use Quadrant Software‘s IntelliChief document and content management offering gained several new capabilities this month with the release of IntelliChief version 2.3. Leading off the list of new enhancements is support for Web forms, which will allow more interaction between the software and users. Other enhancements include better out-of-the-box integration with popular ERP packages, a new “intelligent” rubberstamp designer, an easier-to-use workflow creation system, and upgrades to its indexing feature, among other changes.

While each IntelliChief deployment is as unique as the organization adopting the software, there is usually one underlying goal that doesn’t change:

Late last year, at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, the IT analyst group forecasted that Web mashups would be the dominant development model for the creation of composite enterprise applications by 2010. When you are in the business of making technology predictions, it never hurts to be bold. By the time the due date comes around most people won’t remember the prediction, and the predictor has plenty of time to come up with reasons why the pace of adoption was slower than expected.

This time, however, Gartner might be right on the money.

IBM is going to be doing

Centerfield Technology sold its disk/HUNTER product to its partner, S4i Systems, the companies announced last week. S4i says disk/HUNTER’s capability to detect spikes in i, i5/OS, and AS/400 servers in real time will mesh well with its DASD-Plus product, which provides a longer-term view of disk use, as well as reclaiming lost disk space and forecasting future disk needs.

S4i Systems, which is based in Oceanside, California, has been selling Centerfield’s disk/HUNTER software for years. Disk/HUNTER produces reports that help systems administrators find out which jobs are consuming disk, what objects are associated with those jobs, and who created

Bytware is launching a new animated series on the Web called Moshi Moshi that’s designed to highlight Bytware’s range of tools for i (the operating system formerly known as i5/OS and OS/400). The series, which includes prizes for participants, kicked off at the recent COMMON conference, and will run for several months.

Set in Japan, the new Moshi Moshi series chronicles the day-to-day business difficulties faced by a fictitious company, Moshi Moshi Corp., and the IT solutions introduced by a new American systems administrator, the heroic Harold Stanley–or Hal, a reference to the HAL 9000 computer featured in “2001: A

First Option, an outsourcer of System i (Power System, iSeries, AS/400) servers based in Massachusetts, last week debuted the iSeries Watchdog, a new system monitoring solution that First Option originally developed to assist with its outsourcing business.

iSeries Watchdog collects key health indicators of System i servers and displays them in a color-coded interface. The software, which was written in Java, alerts operators and administrators to system problems and halt messages, and keeps them abreast of the status of tape drives, as well as DASD and CPU usage.

According to Paul Fuller, president of First Option, iSeries Watchdog started

Golden Living, an operator of nearly 350 long-term care facilities across the country, has streamlined the collection of time and attendance data from its 35,000 employees thanks to new biometric terminals from Kronos that plugs into its iSeries Central application.

Golden Living operates a family of companies that each play a role in Golden Living’s goal of serving elderly and disabled people, including nursing homes, rehabilitation therapy, hospice and home health services, and temporary staffing services. At the center of this services-focused company is iSeries Central, a suite of time and attendance, scheduling, and labor management solutions, which Golden Living