Security

nuBridges Product Offers Integrated Tokenization

nuBridges announced nuBridges Protect Token Manager, a data security solution that combines universal format-preserving tokenization, strong encryption, and unified key management in one platform-agnostic package. Unlike traditional encryption methods in which the encrypted data, or "ciphertext," is stored in databases and applications throughout the enterprise, tokenization substitutes a token—or surrogate value—in place of the original data. Tokens can then be passed around the network between applications, databases, and business processes safely, while leaving the encrypted data it represents securely stored in a central data vault. Protect Token Manager introduces a variation of tokenization—format-preserving tokenization. With this format-preserving model, tokens that maintain the length and format of the original data can be generated for all types of sensitive customer, employee, and company confidential information, thereby minimizing impact on existing systems, because the token matches the format of the original value. For more information, visit nubridges.com/solutions/tokenization. nuBridges, Inc. 800-251-4930. nubridges.com.

Systems Management

Kisco Releases Twitter Interface for System i

Kisco Information Systems announces the release of a new interface to the Twitter social networking service. SNDTWEET runs on the IBM System i and can be used to post messages through Twitter. Twitter may appear to be an unusual application for the IBM i community, but there are several uses that Kisco recommends for Twitter. First, you can use Twitter for system monitoring via notifications on updates, outages, etc. Next, use Twitter for message monitoring--set up a program to monitor your system operator message queue. If a message requires a response, your monitoring program can react by sending a Tweet to alert your following users that there is a problem. You can also monitor file update activity for a critical file or for a file that should not normally be updated. SNDTWEET costs $295 for a single partition installation on any IBM i computer. Kisco offers a free 30-day evaluation at kisco.com/sndtweet. Kisco Information Systems. 518.897.5002. kisco.com.

Application Development Tools

Aldon Releases New Build Release Management Solution, Updates Aldon Lifecycle Manager

Aldon has announced the release of two products: a new Build Release Management (BRM) solution and Aldon Lifecycle Manager 6.0, the latest version of its software change management solution. According to Aldon, the BRM solution combines the automated workflow capabilities of Aldon Lifecycle Manager with the deployment and release functionality of Aldon Deployment Manager. The BRM solution allows development teams to use their chosen versioning tool while supporting documentation for compliance and application lifecycle process automation. Developers do all their check-outs, check-ins, branching, tagging and other version control functions in their preferred version control tool. At that point, the final build package is automatically passed to the BRM system, where the package moves through a predefined software development lifecycle that includes compliance-oriented functions. Management can track changes and generate compliance reports. Features provided by Aldon BRM include end-to-end process automation, point-and-click process definition/maintenance, embedded process documentation, among others.

A key highlight of Aldon Lifecycle Manager 6. 0 is a new Import command, which checks in the results of the customer's build process into the first testing environment of the release. The import results in a new "build package," which can then be promoted through the move-to-production lifecycle. Aldon Lifecycle Manager 6. 0 is also an integral component to Aldon's BRM solution and aims to address both IT manager and developer needs related to application lifecycle management. Aldon. 510-839-3535. aldon.com.

Security

Raz-Lee Enhances IBM i Security Solution's GUI

Raz-Lee Security has announced a major new GUI release of the iSecurity suite of System i Security solutions. The new release offers a preliminary access filter for data retrieval, drill-down capability from the Visualizer BI tool to the firewall or audit log, role-based navigation tree providing auditors with only the tree items they require, and standard reports opened directly as GUI tables with advanced Eclipse features for table management. iSecurity offers reports stored in IFS as PC format files, opened directly in CSV, PDF, or HTML. Raz-Lee Security. 1-888-729-5334. razlee.com.

Backup & Recovery

Newcomer to IBM i Storage Space Can Speed Up Your Backups

Gresham Storage recently entered the IBM i space with Clareti Storage Director (Clareti SD). Clareti SD accelerates the backup and recovery process and provides reliability and security. With the Clareti SD, the backup window is maintained or even decreased, and the expense of acquiring additional tape assets can be avoided. The product offers seamless integration and optimization of tape assets and distributed or consolidated backup targets. With the Clareti SD, multiple virtual tape drives can receive backup data over the same Fibre Channel connection. The Clareti SD eliminates the need for a 1:1 ratio of i systems to physical tape drives and instead supports multiple i systems or LPARs with one physical library by using virtual libraries and tape drives. Instead of creating and storing duplicate backups and taking them to an offsite vault, the Clareti SD enables virtual tapes to be copied over the WAN to another set of virtual tapes presented by another Clareti SD, thereby strengthening a business's disaster recovery plan—not to mention saving money by reducing the need for tape storage. Gresham Storage. 800-450-0575. greshamstorage.com.

Systems Management

Quadrant Software Announces New Release of Doc Management Solution

Quadrant Software has released IntelliChief 2.5. From the moment a document is created or captured up to when it is distributed or archived, IntelliChief is tracking it. How many orders have been fulfilled? How long did it take to fill them? Has an invoice been approved? All this information is recorded in a history table, and version 2. 5 lets users run reports against it to, for example, compare last year's orders with this year's. When a document enters workflow, IntelliChief verifies whether other documents are waiting for a match and determines if they can now be routed to their final destination. IntelliChief's WebForm module lets users use a browser to create and fill out a form, such as a purchase order. Version 2. 5 enhances the form so that users can re-edit it, instead of having to reenter the original data or re-create the form from scratch, before it's finalized and approved. When the web form is complete, it is stored in the archive as an image document, preventing future edits. Quadrant Software. 508-594-2700. quandrantsoftware.com.

Application Modernization

BCD Releases New Versions, Expands Features in its IBM i Product Line

Business Computer Design (BCD) has made sweeping enhancements to many of the components that form its application modernization suite. First, BCD released Catapult 7, a PC and IBM i client/server application for automated report and document distribution. Catapult 7 has been rewritten in Visual #C. NET, resulting in increased performance by up to 15 times previous benchmarks. The rewrite takes advantage of modern controls and interfaces in C# that, for example, improved the email process. It also has been completely redesigned with a modern and intuitive user interface and a new Grab Rule Editor that improves the process flow when creating new distribution rules.

BCD has also released Clover 1.6, the real-time IBM i web reporting and querying tool. Clover now has the ability to import query definitions from IBM DB2 Web Query for i. The Web Query definitions can be output as real-time web reports, graphs, spreadsheets, or interactive drill downs with optional prompts and filters, bringing new life to existing reports defined in IBM’s query tool. The following query options are all retained: selected fields, file joins, calculated fields, sort fields, comparisons and level breaks. You can further customize and modify the imported queries in the Clover IDE with the codeless SQL wizard. End users can access reports from a browser; no other PC software is required.

Nexus Portal 3.6, BCD’s portal for secure and controlled access to enterprise information, is now available. This version has a Google Search Appliance portlet that lets Nexus users search any network drives they index with the Google Appliance, in addition to the documents in the Nexus ECM. Besides users accessing all their documents from one location, they get full text searching and search result text previews. Nexus 3.6 also offers performance improvements.

WebSmart ILE 8, BCD’s rapid web application development tool, is available. It adds support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), letting users create connections to different LDAP data sources and manage entries in those sources. It also includes new XML functions that simplify XML document processing and parsing. These functions let users open an XML document, parse the document into a tree, retrieve elements and their children, get sets and subsets of elements, traverse the document tree, and more. The functions also handle all memory management behind the scenes, so developers can focus on writing applications. BCD Software. 630-986-0800. bcdsoftware.com.

Application Development

iFusion.net Protects Yet Uses IBM i Data for Mixed App Dev

LANSA has released iFusion.net, a product designed to bridge the gap for organizations developing in a range of platforms. At the heart of iFusion. net is LANSA's answer: a meta data repository ensures that the rules that govern your database transactions are centrally maintained and enforced by all programs, regardless of the platform or development language (C#, VB. NET, RPG, COBOL, LANSA, Synon, SQL, PHP). The result? Zero duplication of business rules, tighter security, faster performance, and more assured data integrity for organizations that depend on DB2 and SQL databases. Basically, iFusion.net gives Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET Framework developers the authority to perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete transactions on the core databases without risk of jeopardizing data integrity or security. While the concept isn't entirely new, iFusion.net as a product designed to maintain core IBM i data while allowing diverse application access is new. LANSA. 630-874-7000. lansa.com.

Security

SkyView Partners Releases New Version of Security Diagnostic

SkyView Partners announced a new version of Risk Assessor for IBM i, a diagnostic tool that compares your IBM i security configuration to security best practices. The new release includes Payment Card Industry (PCI)–specific considerations and the ability to email reports directly from the IBM i. The product automates the gathering and analysis of essential security configuration information for your IT security audits. Risk Assessor documents your security configuration, comparing it to security best practices, analyzes and interprets your risks, and shows you how to remediate the issues. Risk Assessor gathers security information from more than 100 "risk points" across the i, including 20 different points regarding users on the system, 10 points covering object-level authority, 40 points covering system values, nine points covering exit programs, and 25 points of other considerations including adopted authority, authorization lists, and more. Risk Assessor then provides an assessment guide that tells you why an issue it found was raised as a security concern, what things you need to consider before making any changes, and how you could approach fixing the issues found. SkyView Partners. 425-458-4975. skyviewpartners.com.

Software

Kronos Updates Workforce Management Solution for IBM i

Kronos has released iSeries Central 6, the latest version of its workforce management solution for the IBM i operating system. The new version introduces a browser-based user interface for all iSeries Central users and supports IBM i 6.1. The HTML interface adds a new and improved look to the Kronos application with drop-down menus, hover-over features, and streamlined navigation. The green-screen interface is also available. Each of the suite's components, including Timekeeper, Absence Manager, Scheduler, Activities, and Gaming, also have additional features. Kronos. 978-250-9800. kronos.com.

Software

Varsity Logistics Releases Specialized Analytics for IBM i Shipping Software

Varsity Logistics has announced shipping analytics modules that integrate with its core shipping software products, ShipSoft-Parcel and ShipSoft-Freight. The analytics modules provide Varsity customers access to detailed, historical shipping data. The TransData analytics module maintains historical values of 100 data fields crucial to analyzing shipping patterns and transport carrier costs. TransData extracts and transforms transactional shipping data from Varsity's shipping software, maintaining a consistent history of data elements down to the level of individual shipments. The ShipView Plus analytics module comes integrated with TransData and includes shipping- and transportation-specific dashboards, GIS data visualizations, and slice-and-dice/drill-down information views. Varsity Logistics, Inc. 800-438-7447. varsitylogistics.com.

Application Development

PlanetJ Releases WOW 6.5.5 and WOWFusion Charts 1.1

PlanetJ has released Web Object Wizard (WOW) 6.5.5, the latest version of its rapid application development tool for IBM i web and database applications, and WOWFusion Charts 1.1, an add-on that lets you create visual data presentations for WOW applications. The new features in WOW include end-user UI improvements, such as a more user-friendly, UI-like AJAX auto-complete; context-menu row actions; default actions from directly clicking a row; and hover styles that let the user change the look and feel of returned rows through CSS. Among the new features for developers are an edit operations button and dynamic theme icons to change look and feel on the fly. WOWFusion Charts includes new charts to improve reporting and dashboard capabilities. PlanetJ. 760-432-0600. planetjavainc.com.

Performance Monitoring

CCSS Adds New Disk Monitoring Capabilities to QSystem Monitor

CCSS has released QSystem Monitor 12.5, a performance monitoring and reporting solution for System i servers and Power Systems running IBM i. The new version offers a real-time disk collection feature and capabilities to help managers identify sudden increases in disk usage and eradicate investigation time that follows these events. Two real-time monitors identify the largest library and largest object on the system. The disk monitor can be set to perform a delta scan of a system at intervals during the day and will utilize real-time collection results for object-based elements such as record count and object size. Analysis of disk issues using real-time information, rather than data from the last full collection, gives immediate insight as to the cause and location of sudden and potentially damaging disk use surges. CCSS Corporation. 919-256-8266. ccssltd.com.

Application Development

Apache Software Foundation Offers Apache CXF 2.2

Apache Software Foundation's Apache CXF Team announces availability of Apache CXF 2.2, an open-source services framework that helps you build and develop web services using front-end programming APIs. CXF is focused mainly on the areas of support for web-services standards such as SOAP, the WSI Basic Profile, WSDL, and others; REST-based service creation based on JAX-RS standard APIs; support for various front-end programming models (e. g., CXF provides a JAX-WS 2. 1–compliant front end); and providing ease-of-use features in the framework, such as simple APIs to quickly build code-first services. New features in CXF 2. 2 include WS-SecurityPolicy support, WS-SecureConversation, client-side WS-Trust support, JAX-RS 1. 0 (though not yet TCK compliant), and many bug fixes and performance enhancements. Apache Software Foundation CXF Team. cxf.apache.org.

Backup & Recovery

Shield Advanced Solutions Upgrades Batch Monitoring and Job Recovery Tool for IBM i

Shield Advanced Solutions (Canada) Ltd. announces the release of JobQGenie 5.1, a solution that provides job queue content tracking. Initially released in 1999, the product complements any High Availability (HA) product providing job-to-data mapping. HA software can replicate the job queue object but does not replicate the content of the job queues. In the event of a system failure, JobQGenie lets the user see the state of the job queue and its contents as well as the associated data updates generated by those jobs. According to the vendor, the new version provides the following: new, more efficient data collection engine; more detailed information about jobs; streamlined interfaces; ease-of-use improvements; reduced overhead. A free trial is available on the company's website. Shield Advanced Solutions, Ltd. 519-940-1192. shield.on.ca.

Performance Monitoring

Nimsoft Releases BSM Express for Monitoring IT Business Goals

Nimsoft has announced BSM Express, a business service management monitoring solution that dynamically shows how well IT services align with business goals. BSM Express uses customizable dashboards to give a company a visual picture of the health of its services and measure the financial impact that poor IT performance or downtime has on the organization. This enables organizations to determine, for example, if transaction response times slow down, and how much this occurrence will cost the business. BSM Express is an add-on to the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution, which provides network monitoring, server monitoring, database monitoring, application monitoring, and service level management (SLM) from a single point of control. With the addition of BSM Express, IT departments can correlate and aggregate the monitoring data gathered with the predefined metrics demanded by the various lines of business, enabling IT to measure and prioritize the impact that certain events have on the company’s bottom line. The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution provides server monitoring probes for several platforms, including IBM i, UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Netware. Nimsoft, Inc. 650-570-5401. nimsoft.com.

Application Software

Black and Blue Releases Spell Checker for IBM i

Black and Blue Software has released a new version of its Spell Checker for IBM i. The product looks and acts like a typical PC-based spell checker. Mistakes are marked on the monitor and pop-up windows provide suggestions for corrections, which can be selected with the click of a mouse. It also has an auto change feature. Each user can have his or her own dictionary, and users can create dictionaries based on specific databases or company departments. Users also can administer dictionaries so that additions need approval before they are accepted and available to other users. Spell Checker for IBM i works with any application and without application source code. Black and Blue Software Ltd. 866-862-4914. black-and-blue.com.

Performance

Midrange Performance Group Updates Performance Monitor for IBM i Systems

Midrange Performance Group (MPG) has announced the general availability of Performance Navigator (PerfNav) 14 for IBM i. PerfNav 14 supports recent IBM hardware announcements for the IBM i platform, including new POWER 6+ processor models, blade processors, new SAS disk controllers, and Solid State Disk (SSD). MPG's proprietary "What-If" technology supports modeling of current workloads from down-rev servers to these new technologies to help determine the performance effects of investing in new processors, controllers, and SSD. PerfNav 14 also introduces several functions and features for the day-to-day management of data center servers, including more than 20 new graphs and reports. Four new Current Day Graphs support "drill-down" capability to help with problem determination. Several new scripts provide analysis summaries for DASD, ODBC, response time, service level, and an enterprise performance overview covering all resources in an enterprise. Midrange Performance Group. 800-457-6744. mpginc.com.

E-Business, E-Commerce & EDI

Safestone Technologies Announces PCI Compliance Assessments for IBM i Shops

Safestone Technologies, a supplier of IBM i security and compliance solutions, announces a comprehensive PCI compliance assessment for i shops. The assessment demonstrates how well an organization's IBM i measures up to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). The PCI compliance assessment is available for download at safestone.com. Safestone plans to release a series of security assessments for the IBM i this year, with the first assessment focusing on PCI DSS. The PCI compliance assessment starts with a system scan that runs in a few minutes and then completely uninstalls from the system upon completion. Companies that complete the assessment receive a comprehensive report that shows how their IBM i measures up to the following PCI DSS requirements: build and maintain a secure network, protect cardholder data, maintain a vulnerability management program, implement strong access control measures, regularly monitor and test networks, maintain an information security policy. The report that organizations receive also offers recommendations for improvement, giving a roadmap for organizations to follow. Safestone Technologies. 206-452-0029. safestone.com.

Printers & Printing

DRV Technologies Adds USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode Support

DRV Technologies has announced the addition of the USPS Intelligent Mail barcode (OneCode, 4-State Customer Barcode, 4CB, and USPS4CB) to the list of supported barcodes in the FormFlex software. This barcode will be required by fall of 2009 by the USPS to gain maximum postal discounts. FormFlex is an IBM Power System host-based application that helps organizations reduce costs by replacing expensive pre-printed forms and checks with electronic forms and checks that print form and data in a single pass with logos and barcodes on inexpensive network laser printers. The method DRV has developed to generate the Intelligent Mail barcode bypasses the use of any fonts, thereby eliminating any issues when converting electronic forms to PDF files or printing to different printers throughout an organization. DRV Technologies, Inc. 678-417-1521. drvtech.com.