Today is the day! Announcement Day for IBM i 7.2!
I have the privilege of highlighting the themes for the release, but you are going to want to read about more than highlights, so I am also going to point you to other sources of great information.
In fact, let me start there. In a blog I wrote in February, I talked about the new IBM Knowledge Center. That repository for all IBM products is now available and has been receiving excellent reviews from users. Well, as you might expect, the 7.2 release documentation has a home in Knowledge Center. The URL is http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_72/
From that page you can easily get to what you want, but if you are interested in the overview of 7.2, that link is http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_72/
Now let’s get to the 7.2 themes and some of the technology behind them. I’ll open with the chart we’re using to introduce the release.
Our themes are grouped into two major focus areas. First, we have a list of themes that related to delivering a great platform for today’s solutions. Mobile devices, cloud delivery models, advanced middleware – IBM i 7.2 delivers function that enables all of these. And, in conjunction with the rest of Power Systems, we announce support for the first POWER8-based systems. You’ll be able to find a lot of information about new Power Systems, and we will have more information about how IBM i takes advantage of the new architecture in the future, but that’s not the focus of our IBM i bloggers today.
Our blogs for announcement day focus on Integrating Advanced Technology, the second focus area on the chart.
One of the concepts we’re focused on, and we’ve invested heavily in with recent releases, including 7.2, is enabling data-centric design. Mike Cain talks about that in his blog (http://db2fori.blogspot.com/) and in particular how the new DB2 Row & Column Access Control security functions fit into that approach. Giving DB2 the responsibility of enforcing security, which is part of data-centric design, allows you to remove complexity from your applications and administration, while helping to ensure that you don’t miss anything as you enforce security policy for your organization.
IBM i 7.2 also has a theme of managing your system more easily. As you might expect, these topics fall into the areas covered by Dawn May in her blog (http://ibmsystemsmag.blogs.com/i_can/).
Additionally, Tim Rowe will describe how that management is implemented in Navigator, but he’s also talking about the tech preview of IBM i Mobile Access – a management tool you can run on your smartphone and other mobile devices. Tim starts at its new home for this announcement: blogs.systemideveloper.com
As I said above, in one single week, we can’t cover everything in a major release. If your favorite topic is not covered by one of us in IBM, I encourage you to look at blogs and articles written by others who have dug into the details, or go to Knowledge Center or developerWorks and look around. If you have a chance, you can also join us at the COMMON Annual Conference in Orlando in just a few days, because several of us will be at the conference teaching people more about 7.2.
But if you can’t do any of those things, well, just wait a few weeks. We are certain to have more blogs about this major release for the next several months.
Happy Announce Day, IBM i community!
Congratulations to IBM on the release of i 7.2 and POWER8!
Posted by: Justin C. Haase | 04/28/2014 at 09:59 AM