Planet i

In order to promote IBM Sametime usage at my company, I started a little contest for the month of March. Here's the details...

I already log all Sametime chats to a directory on our server, so capturing the data isn't an issue. I just need to copy them together using a little CL program. For you Windows folks, that can be accomplished easily by joining them via DOS command like copy * chats.txt. Once you have the big file, just open it in a spreadsheet editor like Symphony and get slicing and dicing the data.

In our contest, each sent message, not individual chat, gets counted as one point. This ensures that people who may be chatting with one person all day long in the same chat window would be counted properly. If I were just tallying up the individual chats, that day long exchange of probably 50 messages would only be counted as 1. Not fair, right? Counting all sent messages is more effective.

I also gave additional points for file transfers. AND, since we only had about 20% of our users with profile pictures, I'm giving extra points for those who have a profile picture by the end of the month. Those with pictures already started the contest with those points in hand.

Being in IT, I had some cool complimentary hardware from a vendor that I used as the grand prize. It's only worth a couple hundred bucks, but it's neat gadgetry that users would like.

In order to be fair, I used Lotus Domino policies to enforce Sametime configuration along with token based single sign-on. Everyone had Sametime ready to go a few weeks ago. Nobody can say they didn't have the software.

How did we do? Well, I'd say it was a resounding success. Our Sametime chat usage went up about 40% this month. People are buzzing about sending files and how effective Sametime is compared to e-mail. I'd also say that we now have about 40% of people with profile pictures too. They really make the virtual business card pop. The biggest success were file transfers. I can say we saved a bunch of disk due to people not emailing data to each other and then having it go to the big archive in the sky forever.

Every now and then you get vendor goodies. If you share the wealth a little and make technology fun, good things will happen. I'm off to tally up the results.

Read the original at Steve Pitcher.

Posted to the iManifest EMEA Facebook page!

Read the original at IBM i for everyone!.

Hope you can join me for “Web performance first aid,” a webcast for the COMMON user group. The webcast will be recorded and archived for future listenings as well.

The webcast is for COMMON members, so anyone wanting to hear it needs to join COMMON.

I based the presentation on my consulting practice that helps ensure high performance for PHP and Zend Framework applications on IBM i. Good performance is critical for customer acceptance of web sites and mobile applications.

Webcast link: http://www.common.org/index.php/webcasts/upcoming-webcasts.html

Anyone wishing to see just the slides can do that on my site: http://alanseiden.com/presentations and look for “Web performance first aid.”

Read the original at Alan Seiden's PHP and IBM i Resources.

Date: March 14, 2012

Topic:  Demystifying Journaling and Why You Should Take Another Look

Presented by:  Jeff Ashman, Keith Day, and Russ Roberts of Braid Software.

Jeff, Keith, and Russ have extensive experience with almost all aspects of IBM i Journaling.  The presentation will cover the basics of Journaling and then cover some things that can be done with journaling that you may not have thought about.  Things like real time data auditing & monitoring,   integration/interfacing, debugging, security auditing, and high availability.

Here is the video link of the presentation.

Read the original at GSLMUG.

Well, they were.

I used to have, typically, 50-100 Kbps download speeds from our IBM Quickr server.

I checked everything twice and three times.  I made performance tweaks left and right to no avail.  I had a great conversation with Keith Brooks about it and he pointed me at DNS as a common culprit.  Our DNS server was correct but I began checking the IBM i host table, notes.ini for the Quickr Domino server, the Domino server document, qpconfig.xml...everything appeared clean.

Then I took a closer look at the server document.  The Ports tab, Notes Network Ports tab, Net Address parameter was set to the IP address of our Quickr server.  I changed it to the fully qualified domain name address just for fun.

I saved the server document.  Eureka!  Download speeds were immediately 850-900 Kbps.

Thanks again Keith.

Read the original at Steve Pitcher.

My soon to be 5-year old son will be starting school this fall.  It's a big step in his life.  Hell, it's a big step in mine too.  We have twin daughters at 19 months and it's amazing to think my son was that small just a few short years ago.

As you get older, the names of all the teachers you had start to get harder to remember.  I've been out of high school for 15 years or so and I really only remember, unless I really think about it, three or four teachers from my senior year.

I'd like to think that if you're lucky, you get maybe one or two teachers from grades 1 through 12 that leave a lasting impression on you as an adult. 

I was in my home town a few years ago and decided to go back to my old high school for a few minutes.  I'm not sure what made me want to go there...most of the time I hated high school.  I didn't like authority and I only really applied myself if I liked the class.  It turns out that a teacher who affected me in a profound way was retiring.  I actually ran into him as he was getting ready to leave.  It was lucky that I managed to run into him...just about all my other teachers had retired already.

He had a fun class.  He would purposefully make up technical sounding garbage and discuss it in class, just to make sure you'd read the text book in advance of a pop quiz.  He was very eager on making us not buy into anything without researching it.  Question the answers you get.  Question authority.  Never take anything for face value.  Think about what you're being told and ask yourself why you are being told it.  What's your gut telling you?

At least, that's what I got from it.  Curriculum aside, that class made you use your head and was the only one I actually looked forward to attending.

I thanked him for the two years of his classes that I attended and told him that his work is appreciated, even many years after.  He looked so appreciative.  Even surprised.  Perhaps teachers don't hear that very often, especially years afterwards.  Actually, I'm not sure if he even remembered who I was. 

We shook hands and I left feeling like it's something I should've thanked him for many years ago.  Maybe it wouldn't have meant as much coming from me when I was 20 or 25.  At 33, after living a little bit of life you see how some of those life lessons helped shape you as a person.  Hopefully when that becomes clear to you it's not too late to say thank you.

Read the original at Steve Pitcher.

Read the original at DB2 for i.

The title of this piece should be "how could IBM i be strategic to IBM" based on its antics and pricing strategies for support.  Since the inception of the AS/400 where many customers bought their AS/400 as part of a software bundle from a software vendor that sold them an accounting system, a banking system, an ERP system, or other turn key system many of these customers did not buy support from IBM for OS/400. 

IBM shipped close to a million machines but was only able to track those on software or hardware maintenance.  Since 2009 when in IBM's (Lou Gerstner's) infamous "wisdom" IBM began selling equipment through 3rd party "business partners" they totally lost track of where these machines were going. 

IBM offered its customers the world's best customer service and PTF or ability to get fixes offered by any vendor at any time.  All you had to do was sign up and have your machine go get ptf's from the on-line system.  Now you would have thought that IBM would have tracked the registration and that would have told them who had machines wouldn't you?  Well, various organizations in IBM don't talk to each other very often so the support organization obviously does not talk to the sales organization or marketing. Bottom line they don't keep the data. 

Many companies (I know I did when I was a customer) bought 24 x 7 support for OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i.  Many companies with many systems used to buy support for all of their systems.

IBM saw the number of customers with support (SWMA - the support contract for OS/400) diminishing based on the number of machines shipped  Many business partners provided their own support. 

IBM in their infinite wisdom began increasing the price of support for OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i until it became a huge expense item that every customer questioned.  Customers who would traditionally buy support for all of their machines (and this includes customers with 1500 plus machines in their stores or branch offices) scaled back to one or two machines with a support contracts. They felt they could recreate any issue on these machines and work with support to resolve it then push the ptf's out to the rest of the system (via Operations Navigator and other tools built into the system).

Just this January (see Timothy Pricket Morgan's article in"The Four Hundred"  on how IBM plans to "encourage" users to upgrade to v7.1 of IBM i from V5R5 or i5/OS.

IBM frequently talks about 125,000 machines in use world wide today.  That may be true and it may not.  I do not know and I can guarantee you IBM does not know and only a fraction of those have support contracts.  Some of these "customers" are still running OS/400 V1.3 which was the original OS they got when the vendor sold them the machine along with a turn key software package. 

So lets see, you see sales diminishing, revenue diminishing what do you do?  You increase support costs!  BRILLIANT! 

Before joining IBM I was among a group of serious customers that were advocating a $2,500 and a $5,000 IBM i based machine.  We felt that IBM could have gone after the Windows and Linux market with OS/400 or i5/OS and cleaned up on volume alone.  I got a million BS replies about IBM costs which turns out to be internal funny money costs and not hard dollars.  Anyway it never happened and today we see a rapidly declining market where IBM increases costs and drives customers away from the machine.

The only economic salvation for the IBM i operating system is the embedded DB2.  I priced a comparable DB2 system on LINUX on the exact same machine that was running IBM i and it would have cost about $250k less some discounts.

The other side of that is that many customers are moving to Oracle and the open source MySQL on Linux.  Oracle's public commercial enterprise price list shows the Oracle Enterprise database at about $23,000! There support is a fraction of what you would pay for IBM SWAMA on IBM i.

Contact us.  We can help get you off this wonderful but dying machine that is costing you many times what alternatives (even on the same hardware you have today but using Linux).

Read the original at Bob Cancilla on IBM i.

We have been looking at how to display the messages generated by our products to allow the user to view them. Generating a list of the messages and the first level text was pretty simple, but we wanted to be able to retrieve the 1st and second level text from the message after it has [...]

Read the original at Simply 'i'.

This PowerUp blog entry was written by Isaac Ramírez, a software engineer at BAC Credomatic Network. Isaac is passionate about research and development in different...

Read the original at PowerUp.