• Top Ten Things To Know Before Heading To COMMON

  May 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

  More than a thousand IBM i professionals from around the world will descend on Universal Orlando next week for COMMON’s Annual Meeting and Exposition. Besides the chance to “Party with Harry” (as in Potter, the boy wizard), the conference taking place from May 7 to 10 provides us all a chance to learn about the latest IBM i technologies, explore new solutions, and commiserate with our fellow midrangers.

  With more than 300 sessions on everything from RPG and PHP to Watson and the cloud, the annual COMMON get-together is the largest IBM i conference on the planet. It’s been that …

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• Optimism Abounds in VAI’s Inaugural Survey

  April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new customer survey released today by IBM i ERP software vendor VAI shows that companies are extremely optimistic about the future of their businesses. Besides the almost nonexistent pessimism, the survey also highlighted interest in analytics as a way to boost productivity, as well as a commitment to improve security.

  The United States’ stock market is in the midst of an historic eight-year bull run that shows no signs of quitting. Since stocks hit their low point in the dark days of March 2009, the buying spree has continued quarter on quarter, with nary a correction (defined as a …

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• Surround Tech Keeps IBM i Websites Hip to the Times

  April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The World Wide Web has changed considerably since the first websites went live more than 20 years ago, and many IBM i shops have struggled to keep up. One midrange vendor helping IBM i shops adapt to the times is Surround Technologies, which has morphed its Web application development environment, called Accelerator, into a full content management system.

  In today’s world, having a functional and good-looking website has become a business necessity. In many instances, the website becomes a portal that allows customers, business partners, and employees to access important documents or submit information. In others, the website has effectively …

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• Raz-Lee Tackles Excessive Authorities with Free Software

  April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  You can’t do anything on IBM i without the proper authority. Unfortunately, instead of using the tools IBM includes in the OS to set fine-grained policies, most IBM i shops run wide-open when it comes to user authorities. Now Raz-Lee Security hopes reign in this free-for-all with a free tool it just released.

  For a glimpse at how bad the use of authorities in IBM i has gotten, check out our coverage of a recent security study of the IBM i marketplace. It’s no secret that there’s widespread abuse of special authorities, such as ALLOBJ and SECADM, among the majority …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 26

  April 26, 2017 Dan Burger

  All programming languages gain value from programmers exchanging information the tips and techniques and code samples that get passed around. Open source magnifies this information exchange. Contributing code to make sure that all IBM i languages can benefit is a worthy endeavor, says the business architect of IBM i open source Jesse Gorzinski.

  “RPG First” would make a good slogan for lapel pins and bumper stickers. Brian May, a solutions architect at Profound Logic Software, says it’s also good advice to update RPG skills and become a better programmer before taking on another programming language. Learning new languages will be …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 15

  April 26, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  It has been two weeks since the last batch of HIPER PTFs came out, and while the PTF action is a little on the light side, there are a bunch of important updates that are out for IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3.

  As we have explained before in the IBM i PTF Guide, every two weeks Big Blue updates the High Impact and Pervasive, or HIPER, PTFs that are so critical to the system that in Big Blue’s opinion they should be on every system as quickly as possible. In general, any HIPER PTF that affects any operating …

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• Getting Offensive With The Legacy Label

  April 24, 2017 Dan Burger

  It’s not that we don’t care about CIOs with concerns. But what concerns us more are solutions to those concerns. It’s just a matter of fact that we hear a lot more about problems than we do about solutions. Members of the IBM i community share many of the same concerns, although each has their individual fingerprints.

  To start off down the problem-solving path, it’s not a bad idea to talk about common concerns with colleagues and experts. That’s the path we’re on today as we talk with Alan Seiden, a PHP on IBM i consultant, open source advocate, …

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• State Of IBM i Security: Seven Areas That Demand Attention

  April 24, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The latest installment of the annual State of IBM i Security was released last week by HelpSystems, and the results were about what you would expect: most IBM i servers are basically wide open for abuse.

  In a webinar last week, HelpSystems director of security technologies Robin Tatam discussed the findings of the report, which was based on security assessments conducted on 332 systems during 2016. He broke the findings down into seven core areas that should be addressed, including system security levels; administrative privileges; passwords and user profiles; data and program permissions; network access and exit programs; audit trails; …

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• Guru: Three Ways To Manage Unmatched Data

  April 24, 2017 Ted Holt

  Heaven forbid that I would ignore a failed RPG CHAIN (random read) operation. I always take appropriate action. Which action I take depends on the situation. The same applies to outer joins that don’t find matching data in a secondary table. Here are three ways to deal with unmatched data in an outer join using SQL.

  To illustrate, let’s use three tables from an overly simplified general ledger system. The first is a table of departments into which the business is divided. The second is a chart of accounts. The third is a transaction file that feeds the general ledger. …

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• As I See It: In the Land Of Lost Listeners

  April 24, 2017 Victor Rozek

  “I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears.” – Rumi

  Rumi would not do well on social media. Not much listening going on there. We are a culture of speakers. From the advent of email through the current suite of thumb-enabled apps, all are designed to amplify the mouth. From sea to shining sea, we have become one long declarative sentence fragment.

  Let’s face it: Most of us speak because we want to be heard. Only a priest in a confessional begins a conversation in anticipation of listening to someone blather on about their dysfunctions. But that’s the …

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