Mentoring and More

We were particularly pleased to see the comments to our blog two weeks ago on training new RPG programmers. It's always gratifying to know that you are not the only people in the world who think that educating our replacements is a good idea. Maybe some of you want to work forever--not us--we have many things we'd like to do.

Among the comments was one from Torbjörn Appehl who mentioned that in Sweden a company named Tieto had recently undertaken a program to train young recruits in the joys of RPG. We mentioned this story last year in our blog, but at the time didn't know the name of the company, etc. Now, thanks to Torbjörn, we have been able to look at the company's website and we highly recommend you to pay a visit too. This is a company to be watched. If you don't live in one of the countries Tieto serves, you're forgiven for going off and weeping quietly in a corner as you bemoan the state of IT companies in North America and probably elsewhere.

So many companies seem content to simply deal with resource shortages by outsourcing, which is not only a short-term solution, but also one that in our opinion is also shortsighted. Do we really want our children to be the hewers of wood and and drawers of water for the rest of the world because we were not willing to invest in them? On the Tieto website pay attention to the mention of mentoring programs and other similar investments the company makes. Do you know of anyone in North America doing that? Or are most, as we suspect, simply bemoaning the skills shortage, which is not just an IBM i and RPG issue, and doing nothing about it.

This issue is fresh in our minds as it came up during the roundtable discussion that opened the annual WMPCA Spring Conference, which we are attending this week. Present at the meeting were a number of present and former students of our friend Jim Buck, who we mentioned in the earlier blog entry. Some of them described the importance of mentoring and internship programs to their success and how hard such opportunities were to come by. Jim is currently working on ways of extending the reach of his programs and we hope to work with him on that. Something needs to happen.

Another comment on the blog came from Christian in France who works for a French training company that runs introductory IBM i and RPG training two or three times a year for clients whose companies have recruited young programmers. We were particularly pleased to see Christian's comments regarding modern programming practices and tooling.

In part he said: "Of course, we use SQL and free RPG, even if we have to talk about DDS and fixed form RPG. Our tools are system i Navigator and RDP, no choice!..."

"As you can see, it is possible to teach 'IBM i', it's a wonderful system with many advantages that can be interesting for young people, but we have to show them the 'sunny side'."

The "sunny side" indeed Christian! No young programmer in their right mind is going to be interested in RPG II style fixed-format coding and SEU. You'll be lucky if you keep them for a month, even if they are an unpaid intern! Show them modern RPG and RDP and you'll find a very different response.

Thanks also to the others who commented on the blog. We really appreciate your feedback.

Another point that came up during this evening's discussion was that most IBM i programmers aren't just programmers. They're really business analysts that implement the results of their analysis in RPG. This in some ways reinforces the point we made about retraining experienced business people and teaching them how to program. It was the way Jon's father broke into programming and we know many other people whose entry into the world of computing took a similar path. Now if only we could work out a way to make that happen on a large enough scale to make a dent in unemployment levels and the RPG programmer shortage that would be progress!

Educating New RPGers

We had a discussion with a client this week that we've had many times before. It usually starts off with a question about what language they should use for future development--the implication (sometimes stated) is that RPG isn't an option.

Why? Not because it's an old language, not that it can't do the things they need it to do, but because it has become too hard to find RPG programmers. More specifically, it has become even harder to find RPGers who are willing and able to do modern things.

We responded with the same suggestion that we normally do (and we have done here in the blog before. If you can't find RPGers, look for a PHPer (or Java or .Net or a ...) who seems to have a business mindset (vs. wanting to write games or the next Facebook application) and teach them RPG and DB2. If you stick to /Free and other modern RPG practices--at least in the beginning--our experience has been that they not only learn RPG easily, they actually quite like the simplicity of the language. After they are hooked on RPG, then you can (if you must) gradually show them the ancient-style code that you almost certainly still have lying around the shop.

This idea has been used with great success in a number of IBM i shops. However, to our knowledge anyway, they have tended to be relatively large shops where there were a number of people who could share the mentorship role. In this specific case, we're talking about a relatively small shop. So the time commitment to not only teach the RPG language to the newbie but also to mentor them in the intricacies of IBM i, DB2 for i, etc. would require a very signifiant proportion of the shop's developer resources. And that's a problem.

Schools in the the IBM Academic Initiative program rarely seem to teach RPG these days. This is mostly because, as we blogged previously, even when they graduate RPG-literate students, too many potential employers still insist on three to five years' experience. But, even if all of the school programs were as successful in turning out RPG literate graduates as our friend Jim Buck at Gateway Technical College, the time it takes for students to graduate from such programs is longer than some of our clients can wait. They need to build their five-year plans today--before their existing programmers hit retirement age--and they can't build a plan simply based on the vague hope that there will be RPG programmers around to replace those staff.

A dilemma to be sure. What's the answer? We wish we knew, but increasingly we think that this is an area where IBM, perhaps in conjunction with their business partners, needs to take a lead. There are a lot of unemployed folks out there who have extensive business experience. Many of them probably did some programming with TRS-80, Commodore 64s, IBM PCs, etc. in their youth. Maybe--just maybe--they are a resource that could be tapped to help fill the programmer gap. But it will need an initiative from someone of the stature of IBM to make it a reality and ensure that "graduates" of such an initiative would be able to break through the insane experience barrier that so many shops erect around their hiring process.

Have you encountered this problem? Come up with and solutions of your own?  We'd love to hear about them through comments to the blog.

Happy Endings

We're writing this on the plane flying from Stockholm to Heathrow en-route to a brief stopover at home before we head to Minneapolis for the upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit.

Our friends at Data3 did a wonderful job and the event was very successful with more than 100 of the faithful gathered together to hear about the "latest and greatest" in all things IBM i. The location was beautiful too - just outside the downtown core right alongside the channel into the main harbor. In fact one of the sights at the hotel is to watch the daily arrival and departure of the large and very modern ferries, which the locals affectionately refer to as the "booze cruise." Two or three of these leave Stockholm each day and make the overnight run to Finland or sometimes, apparently, simply into the nautical equivalent of no-man's land. Why? Because Sweden has very high taxes on liquor and apparently these cruises take long enough for you to qualify for a substantial duty-free allowance. As our friends Trevor Perry and Alison Butterill noted, this accounts for the people getting off what appears to be a cruise liner carrying only tiny overnight bags--and very large bags of duty-free items!

But telling you how lucky we were to have been teaching in such a gorgeous location was not intended to be the point of this blog. Instead we wanted to pass on a story related to us by our hosts of one Swedish company's successful approach to the problem of finding new RPG blood. Like many of our customers, the company faced an aging RPG population. While some of their work is outsourced, the organization felt the need to have a strong in-house core to the development team. The solution was to hire recent computer studies graduates and have them trained in RPG. Those of you who read our blog regularly will know that this is an approach we have long advocated, and we have been involved in several such programs. It was encouraging, therefore, to see others successfully using this approach. The training consisted of a three-week classroom period, followed by four weeks of practical hands-on experience and then an additional week in the classroom. Needless to say, crucial to this effort to persuade these new hires that RPG did not mean "Role Playing Game" was the use of modern tools like RDP--no green-screen chains for these newcomers!

If you can read Swedish you can find the details in Data3's excellent magazine. We tried Google translate but it just isn't good enough to publish in that form. So, we hope to work with our friends at Data3 to produce an English version, which with luck we can share with you in next month's IBM i EXTRA eNewsletter.

It is nice to hear a story with a happy ending! But Jon will probably never persuade Susan that herring  is a real delicacy worth exploring.

Don't Just Sit There - Vote Now!

Don't worry - we're not going all political on you, tempting as that might be sometimes. However, there's more than one vote that warrants your attention over the next few days - and it is as important for those of us who live outside the USA as those of our readers who do.

So what are we talking about? COMMON Europe's Top Concerns voting is what. Even though the Europeans organize this effort, it is aimed at a worldwide audience. This is now the 7th year that COMMON Europe have organized this poll and the results to date have been interesting. The fact that some categories such as "Aggressive marketing of IBM i by IBM" get a high ranking should come as no surprise, although the fact that it ranked only in 6th place in 2011 might surprise some. What beat it out? Well "Satisfy internal customers" came in first, followed by "Keep the skills current for existing staff" and "Attract the younger generation to IBM i". We have to believe that the majority of the votes for "Keep the skills ..." came from the "existing staff" themselves because training budgets always seem to be the first thing to go when finances get tight so it seems unlikely that managers were voting this way. It was good to see "Attract the younger generation ..." be recognized as a major concern.

Why is this poll important? Well IBM talk a lot to large users, such as those represented by the LUG (Large User Group) and also spend a lot of time listening to ISVs. But it is much harder for them to get a feel for what matters to "ordinary" users. This survey helps to fill that gap and has the added advantage of being open to all IBM i users around the world. In fact, even IBMers get to vote!

On the Top Concerns web site (www.topconcerns.org), you can vote for this year's top concerns - and maybe even win an iPod for your trouble. There are only a few days left to get your votes in for this year. While you are there don't forget to check out the results of the previous year's polls. The categories and polling method have changed over the years but comparing the results from earlier years can be interesting.

So stop reading - and go vote now.

All done voting? Good - well done! Time for some words on education.

First - for our European/Scandinavian readers, we're headed your way and we'd love to see you. We're working with COMMON Luxembourg  on 9 Oct and COMMON Belgium on 11 Oct. Then we head to Stockholm for the annual Data3 conference 14 - 16 Oct. Lots of i developer topics will be covered. Check it out if you're in any of those areas and don't forget to say hi! Last year's Data3 event was fun and informative and also very successful, so we're hoping we'll see an even bigger audience there this year.

Second - we thought we'd pass on a recent recent discovery in the area of education resources. Coursera.org is a company that partners with top universities around the world to offer high-quality university level education free of charge. Yup - completely free.

One upcoming course that caught our eye is Rice University's Introduction to Python. It is aimed at non-programmers, so that even those of us who wrestle with OO should find it useful. The whole programming environment is browser based so there is no software to load. Our friend (and former RPG compiler writer) Hans Boldt has often proclaimed, in our blog comments and elsewhere, his love of the Python language so this is a good opportunity to check it out. Usage on IBM i seems to be growing if recent forum postings and pieces in the trade press are anything to go by. The IBM i home base for Python seems to be www.iseriespython.com. Check it out.

 

The Pi That You Can't Buy (Yet)

In previous blog entries, we've talked about the falling number of students enrolling in computer science programs and the impact this has on the availability of new programmers. Today we attended a lunchtime lecture by Professor Chris Tyler at Toronto's Seneca College. Tyler is a man who is part of a movement that aims to change this situation. The lecture was part of the Toronto User Group's annual TEC event and a huge "thank you" to the user group for bringing such a timely subject to the community.

Tyler's lecture began with a discussion on the findings of a group from Cambridge University in the U.K. as to the causes of this drop in interest, which is pretty much worldwide. In essence the findings were that while today's students are very tech savvy, it is purely from a user standpoint. They have little or no idea what is "under the hood" and perhaps more to the point, are usually actively discouraged from playing around with the home PC because Mum and Dad need it for their banking, shopping. Facebook, email, etc. That's a very different situation from what those of us who had (say) a Commodore 64. When you powered up a C64 the first thing you saw was the word "Ready" and you were in the Basic interpreter and being actively encouraged to program away. Not only that but for the hardware minded, the machine came with a complete schematic of the entire circuit board, had exposed edge connectors that a simple kit from Radio Shack could plug into, etc. This is very different from today's almost hermetically sealed home PCs.

The Cambridge group's response was to come up with a bare-bones computer that was designed for:

• Ultra low cost--$25 or $35 if you want the optional Ethernet and USB capabilities
• Encouraging experimentation by being open to hardware extensions and software programmability
• Using open-source software 

The result was Raspberry Pi. A credit-card sized all-in-one computer system based on an ARM processor, which is the type of CPU that powers most of the smart mobile devices in the world. To find out more you can go to the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website.

So where does Tyler's group at Seneca fit into the picture? The group had been working for a while on an ARM processor version of the Fedora Linux distribution and offered it to the foundation as the base operating system for the Pi. The result of this collaboration is that the Pi will have an incredible range of free open-source software available for it right from the get-go. In fact Chris' team has managed to create a distribution that is 1.6 Gb in size and fits on an SD card (that's the type in your cell phone or camera if you're not sure what we mean). When the card is plugged into a slot on the Pi and the machine is powered up, it will automatically begin the configuration process, including setting the whole of the card, whatever its size, up effectively as the system's hard drive. A very clever idea. Change the SD card, change the OS!

Sometimes You Can Te Too Successful!

The foundation's initial plan was to produce 10,000 units. When they went on sale Feb. 29, the servers of the two vendors handling the sales were stalled by the sheer volume of people trying to order one. They took orders for 350,000 before closing the ordering system. If you want one, the best you can do is to "register your interest" and those expressing interest will be notified when a new batch of orders can be taken. Even when orders are opened up again, it's anticipated that not all the registered interested parties will actually be able to place an order. That's success on an unprecedented scale. To get on the list of interested parties, register with one of the two distributers here  or here.

One of the other fascinating things about the project is that even at these incredibly low prices, everyone in the supply chain makes money and the foundation will be able to be self-funding.

Back in 2007 we blogged about another very low-priced computer targeted to the education of children--the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. We found out from Tyler that the latest incarnation of the hardware for the OLPC is also ARM-processor based and will be running the Seneca group's Fedora software in the future.

While Raspberry Pi and OLPC are both oriented to making inexpensive computers for purposes of education, the goals of the two programs are quite different. OLPC laptops are intended to be used "as is" to provide a wide range of educational materials on a wide variety of general topics at very low cost, whereas the primary goal of Raspberry Pi is to encourage kids to experiment with the computer itself, encouraging primarily IT innovation and education.

We're excited about the prospect of reawakening an interest in technology careers in kids. It looks like Raspberry Pi offers a good inexpensive vehicle to help us get there.

We're already on the waiting list.

Greetings from Sweden

This week's blog is coming to you from Gothenburg in Sweden. We are here, together with our System i Developer colleague, Paul Tuohy, appearing at ScanDev 2012 - the Scandinavian Developers' conference. This has been a very interesting experience for us as we are much more accustomed to appearing at IBM i focused events - not ones like this that are aimed at developers in general. There are more than 780 developers here, of which the IBM i folks account for around 10 percent. There are 10 concurrent tracks, ranging from .NET, to Mobile, to JavaScript and (of course) IBM i.  

Right now we are in the rather strange position of speaking to an audience of 40+ people in a steeply raked lecture theatre that can actually hold more than 1,000! The organizers had anticipated that most of the IBM i sessions would draw 20-30 attendees and so we had been scheduled in a room with a capacity of about 32. After our first four sessions overflowed the size of the room, they had to try and find us another spot. This was the only remaining room available in the convention center. It is a very strange feeling to move from speaking in a room where your audience are packed like sardines and sit within a few feet of you to one where you are on a stage raised over 5 feet in the air - looking out over a vast expanse of empty seats and where your nearest listener is some 30 feet away. But hey! We're professionals, we can cope with this.

This morning's general session was delivered by Mary Poppendieck on the topic "Software Doesn't Matter" - an interesting title for a session delivered to nearly 800 software developers. It was an excellent discussion on a new approach to development. 

One of her key points is that the integration of design and the user experience into software development are critical - that at the end of the day it is the user's experience that determines whether the project was a success or a failure. This is a very different approach to the one that many of us in the IBM i world take - particularly in shops where the mantra is "I'll start coding and you go and ask the users what they want". 

A magazine distributed at the conference (called The Developer) features an article by Aral Balkan who made many of the same points. The article is about his idea that "The Age of Features is dead, Welcome to the age of user experience." 

In the article, Balkan seems to anticipate that those of us who develop business applications for our own companies (in contrast to those developing software products to sell) might balk at the idea of user experienced based development. 

The part of Balkan's article that particularly caught our eye was this:

" … I can hear you say: User experience isn't that important! I work in enterprise!

Oh. Yes. That. 

Well Mr. Enterprise, you're right! For now. Unfortunately, most enterprise companies operate in an economy of mediocrity where the actual quality of their products is not as important as the abilities of their sales and marketing teams to win over clueless managers. . . Wouldn't it be nicer if your software actually worked? . . . What if it went beyond just working  . . . to providing a beautiful, overpowering, delightful user experience. Heck, instead of dealing with support requests, you could spend your time dealing with satisfied - dare I say, happy - customers. How cool would that be?"

Ouch - that sounds a little too close for comfort.

So it would seem that the word about software design here at this conference is that it must be "user experience driven". This goes well beyond the "satisfied" users and demands "delighted" users. 

So, are your users delighted? 

Saying Farewell to Skip

This week we wanted to give a special shout-out to longtime colleague and friend Skip Marchesani. Those of you who receive our System i Developer emails (and if you don't, you can sign up here) will have seen that Skip recently announced his retirement.

Skip has been a huge part of the IBM i education scene for many years. In fact he can probably lay claim to being among the very first IBM i educators, having organized the IBM team that toured the world educating IBMers and business partners in the months preceding the announcement of what was then the AS/400. Skip was a regular speaker at the IBM Technical Conferences for many years before leaving IBM. He also spoke at COMMON, where he was a proud member of the Lab Rats team. He was also one of the founders of the Education Connection conferences, and spoke often at user group events.

We celebrated Skip's "freedom" at the recent Summit in Fort Worth, Texas, before he headed back to his new home in Vermont. We think he'll survive his retirement, but as you all know Vermonters are a "little bit different" and we're a little concerned that his new home may be rubbing off on him. One particular photo of Skip at his new lakeside home surfaced during the Summit and we thought we'd share it with you because we cannot decide whether an intervention may be called for. Jon, being English by birth, is more familiar with this kind of behaviour than Susan, but even he was somewhat surprised to see such a dramatic change in Skip. Judge for yourself here. In case you are wondering, the lovely lady on the left side of the photo is Skip's wife, Susan.

What do you think? Should we intervene or will things soon begin to settle down and he'll return to the more normal demeanour we expect from his New Jersey background?

All joking aside, many thanks, Skip, for all the years you have devoted to the education of the IBM i crowd, and in particular to the work you have done in popularizing SQL on the platform. It has been a pleasure and an honour to have worked with you over the years.

Lawson Software Users Flock to RSE (or at Least They Should!)

It's conference season again! For us, that means travel season--even more so than our normal travel schedule. Most of the conferences we attend are hosted by local user groups. We were in Wisconsin in March for one of our favorite events--the annual WMCPA conference, followed by our own RPG & DB2 Summit, which involved quite a lot of interaction with the MMSA user group in Dallas. One interesting aspect of both conferences was the increased number of younger developers in attendance. WMCPA always has a few because their president, Jim Buck, usually brings a group of his students along to assist and participate. But we were very pleasantly surprised to see the number of younger folks at Summit--we're used to Aaron Bartell being the youngster!

The following week (now) we're at the NEUGC event--a unique event where multiple local user groups in the area pool their resources to put on a successful and fun conference each year. Once again there seem to be a few younger folks around, but the really good news is that overall attendance is up. We should all applaud that. Next week, we head to Fort Wayne, Ind., for an all-day session focusing on RSE hosted by the local user group there. Then the day after returning from Fort Wayne, we head to Sweden for a developer conference there. The following week our own local user group, TUG, holds its annual TUG TEC event, which is followed by the grandaddy of user group conferences, COMMON in Anaheim. We'll be speaking at COMMON this year for the first time in a while; it will be nice to see some old friends again.

So what does all this have to do with Lawson? Today at one of Susan's RSE sessions at NEUGC, she had the pleasure of making one person really happy over the idea of using RSE to edit source code. In fact she was positively ecstatic. Many SEU users are happy when seeing the productivity features of RSE than leave SEU in the dust. But ecstatic? That is the reaction you get when you're a programmer who can't even use SEU to edit her RPG source code!

What would programmers be using instead? How about EDTF (Edit File)? Never heard of it? It's the green-screen editor for IFS stream files. You can get to it from WRKLNK. Imagine: no PDM or even SEU. Just WRKLNK and EDTF to edit your source code. Next to EDTF, even PDM and SEU look like the greatest programmer productivity tools ever invented. If you've not had the pleasure of using EDTF, perhaps you can remember eons ago using a truly rudimentary editor called EDLIN. EDTF is a tad more advanced that EDLIN but not a lot.

Why has this person been editing RPG source with as primitive a tool as that? Because her source code is stored in the IFS and it was the only editor that she knew of that could edit IFS stream files.

She's not alone. More and more shops are finding themselves in the position of having to edit source code in the IFS because Lawson's recent releases started storing and shipping all of their source in IFS files rather than source members in regular source physical files. Who knows why they would decide to make that rather strange decision? Perhaps someone out there among our readers can enlighten us. Perhaps even stranger is the fact that Lawson doesn't seem to have told their users that RSE is the way to go for editing the code.

Regardless of the reason, the effect has been a dramatic drop in programmer productivity among those RPGers who must make changes to the Lawson code because EDTF is the only obvious way to do it--at least if you're limiting yourself to green-screen tools.

Now the person in Susan's NEUGC session today has learned that RSE (packaged in RDP/RDi/WDSC) has no problem whatsoever working with source stored in IFS stream files, and hence her unbounded joy. RSE can seamlessly handle IFS files for editing, compiling, etc., in exactly the same way it works with source members for the rest of the IBM i community.

This individual wasn't the first Lawson programmer who couldn't wait to get her hands on RSE. One of our recent private classes was to an entire group of Lawson programmers who were equally ecstatic over the prospect of leaving EDTF in the dust.

Now, if we could only get the rest of the SEU users still out there to a have similar revelatory moments about how much more productive they could be ...

Upcoming Travels and Products

Today marks the start of a two-week road trip that will take us to visit the great folks at WMCPA for their annual conference, and then directly to Fort Worth for the 11th (Wow - can it really be that many?) RPG & DB2 Summit. These kind of road trips are exhausting - but also highly rewarding in that we get to meet one-on-one with so many fellow iFanatics.

Summit will no doubt be exhausting. This will be the first one we have run without Skip Marchesani who has decided to retire (again). Skip will be there to help us out this time but there's nothing like a team member moving on to teach you just how much work they did. Thanks, Skip - we'll miss you.

There are two things though that we are particularly looking forward to in Fort Worth. First is the chance to catch up with our long-time friend Bob Tipton who is delivering our keynote presentation. If you haven't had a chance to read Bob's new book "Jump!: Get Unstuck" you need to grab a copy. In fact if you come to the Summit we'll even give you one! 

The second highlight is that the folks at CNX have chosen the Summit to announce the latest version of their Valence web tools. They gave us a sneak peak at the new Valence Nitro application builder that they will be featuring in the new announce. All we can say is WOW. This is a really interesting tool and you owe it to your shop to take a look at it once it is formally announced. We were so excited though that we asked the guys at CNX if they could give us a link to a "sneak peak" Web page to give our readers a brief preview. They have done just that and you can find out more right here. Page down and look for the section on Valence Nitro. We will be giving it a test drive as soon as we can sit still for 5 minutes. 

We can't say anything more at the moment, but last week we were given a brief open kimono on another new tool from a major vendor in the IBM i application development arena. We'll be getting more information toward the end of this month and hopefully they will allow us to share some details with you then. If the preliminary information is anything to go by then it too will be a game changer just as Nitro promises to be.

Seems to us that we have left the doldrums of the IBM i application development field and that some really exciting tooling is beginning to emerge. Perhaps it was spurred in part by the interest shown by users in the Open Access tools, or maybe the easy availability of high quality Open Source products like SugarCRM or osTicket - the latest to catch our eye. Whatever the reason the future is looking brighter than it has for a long time. Many excellent tools, more realistic price levels - there's some real excitement out there.

 

 

Looking Forward to Saying 'Yes' in 2012

We've said it before and we'll say it again--the current economic climate is presenting many IBM i shops with the perfect opportunity to prove their worth and make sure the IBM i (and they) are around for the future. A lot of the more ambitious (and often futile) major software changes are on hold. In other cases (and we learned of another such example today) the financial climate is making companies take a long hard look at the true economic realities of the "miracle" software that they have been struggling to implement. The result of such reality checks is invariably a realization that the new system has racked up at least twice the originally projected cost, uses far more hardware and manpower than promised, and often under performs. Pity that it took an economic disaster to make people realize what many of us could have told them before they started!

One successful tactic that an increasing number of shops are trying involves having your IT department act as a vendor. If you know that software/hardware package XYZ is under consideration, ask to be considered a vendor. Put together a bid and ask for it to be considered as an alternative. Even if you factor in the costs of a major rewrite of your existing applications, add the cost of learning new skills, and add in a few experienced contractors to help mentor the team and bring them up to speed on the "new stuff" we'll lay you odds that you will still come up with a budget that is less than 50 percent of package XYZ. You'll also find that you can set a project time-line that is significantly shorter than that for XYZ, and will offer greater customization for the users. You can do it. It works. After all, who knows your business better than you?

In other shops, we're seeing smaller projects emerge where IBM i developers seize the opportunity to show off "what i can do" that impresses their user communities. You may be surprised how much impact you can have by trying your hand at small modernization projects, such as producing browser interfaces to what were spooled file reports (many ways to do this, most requiring minimal modifications to existing RPG report programs) or providing an easy Web service via XMLSERVICE.

On the subject of modernization, Jon did a lunchtime seminar for the Atlanta User Group (amcu.org) today titled "Modernizing Your Applications--For Free" where he focussed on many of the free tools that we have mentioned here and in our columns for IBM i EXTRA. It was a good crowd--bigger than they've had in a while apparently--and the subject fit in well with their theme for this year's education series, which is modernization.

Jon challenged his audience at AMCU today to "just say yes" when requests come in for "out of the ordinary" application functions. Say yes and worry about how implementation. If you say no or even if you say, "Let me get back to you on that after studying the options," before you know it, someone in the Windows group will have jumped on the project or the users will have found a packaged "solution". As a result, you may well end up spending more time in the long run wrestling with integrating what they did than it would have taken to implement the project on i to begin with.

AMCU is also planning to cooperate with other user groups that are working to update their members' skills. One such group, SEMIUG (the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group), is currently working on a collaborative project aimed at teaching members new skills while helping to demonstrate the viability on the IBM i as a modern platform. In fact SEMIUG's meeting tonight is dedicated to a progress report and anyone can join the webcast and see what they are up to. See here for details.

We applaud efforts like this and intend to work with these groups whenever possible.