• As I See It: Focus

  August 7, 2023 Victor Rozek

  I heard a startling statistic the other day: The average American worker is only able to concentrate for three minutes at a stretch without interruptions – most of them self-inflicted. That seemed hyperbolic at first, and equally exaggerated when the stat floated through my brain later that same evening. Surely, that can’t be true; and it certainly didn’t apply to me.

  At least that’s what I thought until I realized while I was pondering the demise of the American attention span, I was also watching a Netflix series on TV while simultaneously gorging on YouTube news clips playing on my …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 25, Number 32

  August 7, 2023 Doug Bidwell

  Here is what is new: A new “version” of Access Client Solutions (ACS) is available for download, catch the link in the Guide. (Your “Check for Update” won’t catch it, and you won’t see the version until you get all the way into the ACS Main window, and do the Help/About.) This is an updated version, no change to the ODBC driver. This version of ACS uses the IBM GSKit version 8.0.55.31 with the latest security updates.

  This is important: Prior versions of ACS have security defects. Specifically, Security Bulletin: IBM i Access Client Solutions – Windows Application Package is …

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• ASNA Generates First-Class C# from RPG with Encore

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  ASNA this summer unveiled a new version of Monarch, its flagship offering for migrating RPG applications to .NET Core. The big new deliverable with Monarch 11 is the introduction of Encore RPG, which enables IBM i shops to convert their RPG directly into usable C# source code. The new product will help IBM i shops with aging RPG programmers make the gradual transition to C#, ASNA says.

  ASNA originally launched Monarch way back in 2004 as a mechanism for converting RPG code into a language supported in Microsoft’s .NET Framework (Microsoft replaced the .NET Framework with .NET Core back in …

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• New GUI, Native SMS Come to Kisco’s iEventMonitor

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  There’s a lot going on inside your IBM i server – too much for a single administrator to track it all, let alone do so in real-time. One product that helps automate IBM i monitoring is iEvent Monitor from Kisco Systems. With the recent release of version 7, the company has added a new GUI, support for native SMS messaging, and monitoring for SQL security certificate expirations and thread waits, among other new features.

  Kisco Systems rolled out iEventMonitor back in 2015 as a budget-minded system monitoring tool for IBM i shops. Starting at just $400 for a single LPAR, …

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• Midsummer Security Indicators: Hot and Gloomy

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The hot summer heat is smothering Americans like a tight polyester jacket these days. Also having big impacts on Americans are hackers, security vulnerabilities, spam, and malicious emails, which seem to be peaking with the seasonal fry.

  Security software company Securin scanned 8 million addressable IPs among US state government systems, and discovered 119,000 instances of high-risk services that could be easily exploited, according to a report released yesterday, dubbed “The State of Cybersecurity in America.”

  All told, Securin found 3,700 exposed databases (Db2 among them), 3,400 exposed Secure Shell (SSH) endpoints, 2,780 exposed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) systems, and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, August 2

  August 2, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  As we roll into the latter part of the year, many of your organizations – and many of you – are planning what to do to end the year successfully. But making the decision on which way to steer the ship can be very stressful, and companies can stagnate without a fearless leader at the helm. Our Top Story suggestion this week looks at how success comes from action; and why those who delay may not succeed. Not that there aren’t reasons to hesitate, but being able to make the call when to take the risk is a critical skill. …

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• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

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• Fully Managed Disaster Recovery For IBM i Partners

  July 31, 2023 Ash Giddings

  Maxava, a vendor dedicated to High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) for the IBM i market, has announced a new offering aimed at resellers, independent software vendors, and managed service providers, Maxava’s Fully Managed Disaster Recovery (FMDR) offering provides partners with all the components necessary to manage every aspect of IBM i DR. This extends all the way from initial planning, through implementation, ongoing monitoring, virtual and real role swap testing, to 24×7 crisis support in a disaster.

  John Dominic, Maxava’s vice president of global sales, says: “Our partners are telling us that their customers no longer want a …

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• You Guessed It: AI Will Drive Cloud Adoption

  July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  What do you think will be the quickest way to try out AI extensions to applications? Will it be trying to get your hand on models, tweaking them with your data, and then integrating the AI extensions with your own applications? Or will it be trying out a SaaS-style AI tool where all of the work is done? Or better still, moving to a SaaS application that has AI in it from the get-go?

  It will be no doubt the latter two options. And this, as much as any other force, is going to hasten the shift for certain workloads …

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• IBM i Work Problem Feature Unemployed For Software Faults

  July 31, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the true differentiations of the AS/400 platform launched 35 years ago was Electronic Customer Support, which at the time involved remote diagnostics and the ability of the machine to reach out over a modem – remember, there was no commercial Internet yet – to connect directly to IBM and report problems as they were happening.

  After three and a half decades, there are a lot of different components and features of the IBM i-Power Systems Electronic Customer Support (ECS) and Electronic Service Agent (ESA) customer care services, way beyond what was available in the original ECS. But recently, …

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