Angus: IBM Stepping Up!!

The feedback from my #IBMiStepUp Twitter campaign has been fascinating (more on that campaign here). There are a few retweets of some of the tweets, there are a lot of people who read and comment to me in person later, and yesterday I was attacked for posting negativity and rants. Although, being called a rant of 140 characters is quite a compliment! Several companies and individuals have responded to the #IBMiStepUp request, and have upgraded their websites, marketing, and so on. Slowly, there is a movement towards supporting IBM i and its future, while moving away from the past.

However you view the campaign, it goes on everywhere. At an IBM Champions meeting, I talked with the IBMers responsible for the IBM i landing web page. At the time, the title started with “AS/400” and the large print was something like “IBM i (including AS/400, iSeries and System i). You may notice that this has been upgraded, and now, the title of the IBM i landing page says: “IBM i (Power Systems software supporting AS/400, iSeries and System i applications)”. The large print now says “IBM i” subtitled with “For Power Systems”. This is wonderful, and it shows IBM’s willingness to respond to the community’s requests.

Of course, IBM must have tens of thousands of web pages, and when people complain about one or more of them mentioning an old brand in the wrong context, I ask them to contact IBM, or talk with an IBMer at an event like COMMON or the RPG & DB2 Summit.

One of the major complaints in our community is that IBM does not update their documentation “quickly” enough. I am sure they have millions of pages to update, and my argument has always been a question of where you would want IBM to invest their dollars. Would you rather IBM spends money upgrading the OS features and functions, or would you like IBM to spend their limited (you know it is) IBM i budget dollars on documentation of every page ever written about our platform?

Recently, I was looking for information about the HTTP server functionality in IBM i. I discovered that the IBM i 6.1 Information Center included a reference to IBM i5/OS PASE. See here:
CGI6.1

For a moment, I was stunned – until I realized that IBM i5/OS PASE was probably the name of the product when the documentation was written. I checked the IBM i 7.1 Information Center and discovered the reference was now made to IBM PASE for i – see here: CGI7.1 .
The two things I know from this are that IBM is updating their product names to the new branding, and that IBM is working on their documentation to be current.