On December 5, 2023, Alan joins fellow IBM Champions Koen Decorte and Charles Guarino at IBM France for a day-long seminar and networking event focused on IBM i modernization, AI, Business Intelligence (BI), and cyber resilience.
Sponsored by IBM and CD-Invest, the seminar agenda balances educational sessions with opportunities to ask questions and have informal discussions with the presenters and fellow attendees.
IBM TechXchange in Las Vegas Sept. 11-14, 2023, should be quite the bash. Attendance will include a few thousand IBM customers, IBM Champions, and IBMers, as well as an assortment of well-wishers, hangers-on, and the merely curious.
Having just celebrated the 35th anniversary of the origins of the IBM i platform, it’s time to celebrate another milestone: the fourth year of iChime, the online meeting of IBM i friends begun by Charles (Charlie) Guarino in 2020 as a way to stay connected during the pandemic.
IBM Champions Jack Woehr, Niels Liisberg, and Alan Seiden mug for the camera
The Common Europe Congress 2023 in Prague hosted around 400 international attendees steeped in IBM Power Systems from 11 June to 14 June.
This was my first visit to a Common Europe event, and I was greatly impressed. The organization was tight, the venue world-class, and the level of enthusiasm among the participants high. The sessions were interesting and useful.
I’ve admired Patrick Behr’s work in the IBM i community for many years. One of the most talented IBM i developers I know, he draws on an impressively broad range of skills to build future-minded solutions to today’s business challenges.
That’s why I’m delighted to announce that Patrick Behr has officially joined Seiden Group’s team of technical consultants. In addition to his excellent technical and business skills, his commitment to mentoring and advocating for the IBM i community make him the perfect fit for our team.
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You may have heard about IBM’s new Merlin tools for modern RPG development methodology. But what is it, really, and how would it benefit your shop?
Seiden Group’s Jack Woehr, one of the top Merlin advocates in the country, will be presenting three talks on Merlin at COMMON NAViGATE on Oct. 4–5, 2022:
I’ve admired Jack Woehr’s contributions to the IBM i community—and his practical approach to IBM i modernization—for several years.
This spring, I asked him if he would deliver my ODBC session for POWERUp 2022. That discussion inspired us to get to know each other better and develop our working relationship.
I’m delighted to announce that, in June, Jack officially joined our growing team of Seiden Group consultants. With extensive IT experience, Jack brings a broad understanding of both current and legacy IBM systems. He excels in modernization, cross-platform integration, and APIs. He also knows SQL, RPG, COBOL. Vue, javascript, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, C/C++, Maria DB, MongoDB, and Linux. Don’t even get me started on how many musical instruments he plays!
Liam and Alan at POWERUp 2019
To say that Liam Allan is a powerhouse in the IBM i community would be an understatement.
Liam burst onto the IBM i scene in 2016 as a Club Seiden member and the recipient of COMMON’s Student Innovation Award. Skilled in multiple programming languages, he chose to advance the art of bridging the worlds of RPG and open source. Later, he joined Seiden Group’s team of open source and IBM i experts.
Liam contributed a staggering amount to the IBM i community. As a conference speaker, his enthusiam inspired even the jaded to try new approaches. He has created how-to videos and tutorials, contributed to open source projects, and answered questions on forums. He built Code for IBM i, a free extension for Visual Studio Code that supports IBM i development in RPGLE, CL, COBOL, and Db2 for i.
UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
The May 3, 2022 announcement of IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 TR6 gave us a lot to unpack. It rolled up many enhancements from previous TRs, then threw in a new subscription option for IBM i and a new modernization framework called Merlin.
If you’re running Seiden’s CommunityPlus+ PHP, no worries. It’s compatible with IBM i 7.5.
Here’s a collection of the articles and podcasts we found to be most informative for IBM i application development teams.
You are invited to join Alan Seiden on Tuesday, April 19, 2022, as he presents Dr. Alan’s IBM i Web Checkup to the OMNI User Group. With an option to attend via Zoom or in person at Papa Passero’s in Westmont IL, you can join from virtually anywhere.
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