This month’s new products roll-call includes two new offerings from France and one from Switzerland.
South Paris-based SystemObjects Corporation has launched Push4Servers, a new utility that sends mobile device notifications, text messages and emails to users directly from IBM i or Windows systems/apps.
Push4Servers (pictured above) requires IBM i V6R1 or higher and comes in three parts. The first two are a cloud-based message management module and a server-based connector module. The third is the free Push4Servers mobile app used to receive push notifications, available from iOS and Android stores.
The product is an expansion on SP4i-Push, which SystemObjects released last year. On Power i, an automatic log analyser filters messages from the QSYSOPR and relays them according to the rules defined in the message management module. For Windows – and for IBM i applications that do not write to QSYSOPR – the job is done via a call to an API that is installed with Push4Servers’ server connector module.
Serge Charbit, CTO and President of SystemObjects, says: “If you have a mobile device, you shouldn’t have to be logged into your system all the time to know if anything important is happening. Or worse, rely on crisis calls.
“Push4Servers will broadcast important information – as soon as it’s available – to the people who need it. You can use it for anything that generates a message to QSYSOPR…notify your field support when a customer is waiting for onsite service, update sales managers when contracts close, anything.”
Security specialist Cilasoft, which is based in Metz-Tessy in France’s Rhône-Alpes region, has introduced a new product, CENTRAL. The solution provides a unified view of data across multiple files as well as data-set distribution and command execution across multiple IBM i environments from a central machine.
Guy Marmorat, president of Cilasoft, explains that his firm had a growing number of customers that run its security and compliance products on multiple machines. They needed a better, more unified view of security and compliance log files from all of their locations. However, with CENTRAL, the company took this idea few steps further.
Marmorat says: “Firstly, CENTRAL can be used with any DB2 file on any number of IBM i environments – whether Cilasoft files or not. Secondly, CENTRAL works bi-directionally so it can be used to distribute or consolidate data over multiple IBM i environments. And, thirdly, CENTRAL lets users run commands that affect multiple IBM i environments from a single machine.”
The product includes two versions. Its runtime version is designed to consolidate Cilasoft-generated security and compliance log files, deploy security rules across Cilasoft products running on multiple environments, and run remote Cilasoft commands across multiple environments.
Its open version can be used without any limitation across any database file or command – whether the files or programs are used by Cilasoft applications or not.
Zug, Switzerland-based Midrange Dynamics has released MDRapid, a new tool that updates IBM i database files to SQL.
MDRapid works in conjunction with the firm’s MDCMS change management software. The company says that when a file structure is modified, users typically lose access to one or more applications while the change is implemented. Issues arise when the data copy or conversion can’t fit into an available downtime window due to file size. The need to quickly and securely deploy changes to high-volume files on multiple servers compounds this challenge.
MDRapid therefore employs MIMIX Promoter from Vision Solutions to migrate data to new file formats while the application is in use. Any changes made to the current version of the files are journaled and synced with the new version held in the staged library. Thanks to a low performance footprint, users are not impacted during this process.
Midrange Dynamics managing director Michael Morgan says: “Since it deploys database changes quickly, even for multi-million- and multi-billion-record files that have an extensive amount of update activity, it’s easy to integrate MDRapid into day-to-day operations. It’s helpful long-term for any type of database change. Another major benefit of using MDRapid is that your business is protected from risk. If anything goes wrong, you can roll back to your old production data.”
