IBM i, being an integrated
operating environment, has tremendous capabilities. A few of us in the
development lab in Rochester have wanted to find a more direct way to share all
of the great things done to improve and enhance IBM i. We document the
enhancements in the IBM i Information Center, but outside of our marketing
information, it's hard to find a nice summary of "What's new in IBM i
6.1" (or whatever release you’re interested in.) You have to scour the IBM i Information Center for the "What's New" topics scattered throughout the documentation,
or look through the information and see what has been identified as being
changed. And even then, not everything may be there. Many enhancements have
been delivered via PTFs for current releases and the documentation is generally
in the PTF cover letter --and I suspect most of you don’t read all the PTF
cover letters! Plus there are no change flags on command documentation, so you
have to manually compare to figure what, if anything, has changed. The
documentation provided by IBM also tends to be very task oriented -- it tells
you how to do something, but it may not tell you why you care. In fact, the same
concern was raised in the blog by Susan Gantner and Jon Paris a while back, and it
pointed out to us that there was a need for a more interactive, direct method
of spreading the word about the capabilities of IBM i.
The intent of this new blog is to share the “hidden gems” within IBM i. The name “i Can” is to convey the fact that IBM i can do even more than most realize. The updates to this blog will generally be information about the latest features in the most current releases of 5.4 and 6.1. I hope to also provide some insight into why you may actually be interested in something you didn't realize you should know about.
As I’ve been planning what I'll be
writing about, I discovered something -- there are a lot of enhancements and
features that even the leading experts within the development lab weren’t aware
of. If we within the development lab have a hard time knowing the full
capabilities of our beloved operating system, how much more challenging it must
be for those of you who are users of it!
And who am I? I've been working on
the IBM i and its predecessors my whole career, all of which has been at IBM in
Rochester. I’ve generally been part of the team that works on the “little
things” that provide good value for our customers and rarely been part of major
announcements within a release. Thus, sharing information about the hidden gems
has always been something I thought we could do better, and now the opportunity
to do just that is here. I have technical leadership responsibilities on IBM i
in what I call the “core” technologies - work management, messaging, output and
print management, security, networking, performance and diagnostic tools,
install/upgrade, etc... -- most of the things that we've had on i forever; those
things that are central to the integrated value of what i provides.
I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to share information via this blog. But this blog won't be written by me alone; we'll have developers from the lab share their expertise through this blog as well. In my (very biased) personal opinion, the i development lab in Rochester is second to none. I find it amazing what that team can accomplish! We just need to do a better job of getting the word out about everything that i can do. If there are topics that you want to hear more about, please let me know! And please provide your input and feedback via blog comments.
I've added your blog to planet i (http://planet-i.org).
Posted by: david | August 11, 2009 at 11:32 AM
This is a cool idea. How about morphing it into the old "Tips and Techniques" composites that used to come out of Rochester and were also presentations at COMMON? Just put in on the magazine's webber with a xref index and this is gonna mushroom big time... :)
Posted by: Don Rima | August 11, 2009 at 04:32 PM
Finally - A great source of good news from the Rochester front. Thank you Dawn! Looking forward to the goodies!.
For those who do not know Dawn, she is an AWESOME speaker at COMMON and general representative of the IBM i at many interesting discussions like the COMMON Americas Advisory Council where we tend to take the gloves off while debating IBM i Operating System Specifics and then go out for a beer!
This is going to be a great place to learn more about the i...
Thank you David for adding this in!
Posted by: Mike Pavlak | August 12, 2009 at 08:00 AM
BRAVO DAWN! I so agree with this concept. I sat in Jim Herring's office with a few colleagues after 5.4 was released. We had been running the release for 6 months at this time yet the experts Jim invited from the lab STUNNED us with features new to 5.4 that we had no idea existed!
How frustrating it must be to create some cool new feature or function only to realize that nobody knows about it!
BLOG AWAY!
- DrFranken
Posted by: DrFranken | August 12, 2009 at 08:24 AM
Giddy up! I am officially subscribed to this blog. Can't wait for some hidden gems.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
Posted by: Aaron Bartell | August 12, 2009 at 03:23 PM
Welcome to the club Dawn - delighted to hear that we helped inspire this new vehicle.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
By the way, the next RPG and DB2 Summit is in Minneapolis from October 13th to 15th - if you would like to have another opportunity to chat with a few "real" IBM i users we'd be more than happy to host you for a day or two.
Posted by: Jon Paris | August 12, 2009 at 06:13 PM
What a great idea for a blog, Dawn! I'm really looking forward to reading this regularly.
I may also be biased, but as we've said in our own blog, Jon and I certainly agree with you that the IBM Rochester lab has many remarkable people doing remarkable things. And too many of them don't get to be heard by the general public. Hopefully your blog can help to address that!
Posted by: Susan Gantner | August 14, 2009 at 12:05 PM
Welcome to the blogging world Dawn!! I just blogged about your new blog to help get the word out.
What a great concept for a blog, this will be extremely helpful to our customers.
I have an RSS feed to your blog set up in my Notes client, so I will be able to keep abreast of all of the great things you and your team will be posting.
Posted by: Kim Greene | August 19, 2009 at 01:56 PM
Dawn, I would be very intereseted in locating a good resource for the iSeries Navigator for V5R4. Do you or your cohorts have any favorites for this?
Posted by: Kevin Purtell | August 21, 2009 at 12:18 PM
Hi Kevin,
The IBM i Access link from last week's post on documentation does link to the iSeries Navigator page.
However, there is a Web page just for Navigator. The URL is http://www.ibm.com/systems/i/software/navigator/
Under the Resources tab you can find a lot of great information!
It does appear that the link to the Information Center just takes you to the main Information Center page. In the V5R4 Information Center, you will find iSeries Navigator under the "Connecting to System i" topic.
The URL to get to iSeries Navigator in the V5R4 Information Center directly is
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r4/topic/rzahg/rzahginav.htm
Dawn
Posted by: Dawn | August 24, 2009 at 11:21 AM
You can find which CL commands are new and changed via the CL command finder (Programming > Control language > CL command finder > Find by group). It's true that you cannot see what has changed within the particular command because there are no >> << indicators, but you can identify which commands are new or changed through the lists in the finder.
Posted by: Beth Taylor (IBM) | August 25, 2009 at 03:47 PM
Some of you might find this useful - There is a summary of what is new and changed in the IBM i Information Center each release. Here is the V6R1 summary: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v6r1m0/index.jsp?topic=/rzahg/rzahgicoverview.htm
The links here go directly the "what's new" information for each category. Or, if the entire category is new, the link will take you to the overview page.
Posted by: Jessica Erber-Stark (IBM) | August 25, 2009 at 04:12 PM
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have a very large collection of AS/400, iSeries, IBM and all things 400, so to speak, websites.
I have found all kinds of free "stuff" that we use regularly.
I also spent a lot of my own time researching / compiling this "stuff".
It's nice to know someone has taken the time and effort to put something like this together.
Posted by: Michael Mayer | September 03, 2009 at 09:01 AM
Hey Dawn, we're pulling for you, and for the other fine folks in Rochester. We're pulling for IBM i.
-Nathan
Posted by: Nathan M. Andelin | September 25, 2009 at 04:36 PM