• Big Blue Changes Gears Slightly With IBM i TR Plan

  April 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The coronavirus has infected over a million people around the globe and forced hundreds of millions of employees to work from home. But it won’t stop IBM from announcing the next batch of Technology Refreshes, ostensibly IBM i version 7.4 TR2 and IBM i version 7.3 TR8, sometime in the next couple of weeks. Its plans for sharing the information, however, have changed.

  IBM has essentially shuttered its lab in Rochester, Minnesota, which falls under that state’s social distancing orders to help prevent the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. More than 80 percent of the United States is …

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• The IT Sector Could Weather The Pandemic Storm

  April 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a rough couple of weeks for absorbing exponential data. It is astounding has fast the Great Infection, my term for the combination of the coronavirus outbreak and the reprise of the Great Recession that it looks like it is causing, is upon us. Nearly 10 million people have lost their jobs in two weeks, and my guess is that will more than double again next week and keep building from there, perhaps quadruple until we go from 3.5 percent unemployment in the United States to maybe 15 percent or so.

  The hope is that this is temporary, …

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• Sending Your IT Department To The Teledoctor For A Checkup

  March 30, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Quite a few of us in the world are going to have experience with telemedicine in the coming weeks, if we have not had it already, and so barriers to providing medical service are going to come down. The same kind of remote health experience is available for IT departments from a relatively new company called Chordia Consulting, which has created a remote IT healthcheck that now has a variant tuned specifically for IBM i shops and their special characteristics.

  And in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Chordia’s co-founders, both ex-IBMer’s with experience in the IBM midrange, are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 30

  March 30, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  There’s no hiding from the global pandemic so we’re facing COVID-19 head on just like many of the leaders around our IBM i ecosystem who have stepped up to protect their employees and assist other companies scrambling to adapt and survive. To that end, we have added a new section to Monitor called “COVID-19 Response Updates” where you can look every week to get the very latest news and solutions related to the coronavirus. Many of the vendors in our community are offering solutions free or at a reduced cost to assist others at this time of need so be …

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• Love – And Business – In The Time Of Coronavirus

  March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are shaped by bad times as much as good ones. Maybe more.

  Some of my earliest memories as an aware young person are of the effects of recession on my parents when they were young people working in the factories of New Jersey. And when I say young, I mean we were all young at the time. Both of my parents lost their jobs in the recession of 1960 through 1970, and they lost them again during the much worse recession from 1973 through 1975. It was scary for me and my siblings, but obviously even scarier …

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• Coronavirus Takes Its Toll On The Midrange

  March 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i midrange community has lived through a lot: hurricanes, fires, global recessions, and even terrorist attacks. And now it can add “viral pandemic” to the list of external events impacting the day-to-day operations of IBM i shops around the world, not to mention the cancellation of nearly all in-person meetings and conferences for the next two months.

  As the national reels from the spread of the novel coronavirus and the pneumonia-like disease that it causes, the IBM i midrange community has been forced to make substantial changes to its daily operations. For many office workers, that means forgoing …

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• COVID-19 Response: Fresche Donates Presto Licenses, Uncaps User Fees For Access To IBM i Apps

  March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Web application development tools have suddenly become much more important in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest third-party software development tool provider in the IBM i market, wants to help companies with cope with remote workforces.

  Like other companies worldwide, Fresche has the majority of its employees working from home during the quarantines that are in effect to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and they are also capable of supporting customers whose end users, programmers, and system administrators are also working from home.

  But this is not enough, and Fresche knows this. To …

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