On Wednesday, October 14th join Relion Solutions’ Nathan Williams as he presents From Client Access to ACS: A Migration Playbook.

IBM i Access for Windows, Mac, and Linux has been unsupported for years, and every day running it is a day further from IBM’s last fix for it. Meanwhile, IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) keeps shipping new features and, just as importantly, new security patches. This session is a practical playbook for making the move: what actually changes under the hood, a real walkthrough of getting the software and running a single-PC install so you’ve done it once yourself, which of three realistic deployment paths fits your environment, and exactly how session files, keyboard maps, macros, and data-transfer definitions migrate (and how they sometimes don’t). We’ll walk through staging a real, repeatable deployment image per user group with AutoImport and silent installs, then cover what can safely coexist with legacy Client Access during the transition and what can’t, so you can plan a cutover with no surprises.

Learning Objectives:

• Explain why continuing to run IBM i Access for Windows/Mac/Linux is a security and support risk, not just an inconvenience, citing its end-of-service date and ACS’s own recent security history.

• Download and perform a single-PC ACS installation and explain what the install script’s deliberately limited question set actually configures.

• Choose the deployment model that fits their environment’s size and support capacity and explain the standard-vs-shared install distinction.

• Migrate 5250 sessions, keyboard/poppad/menu maps, macros, and data-transfer definitions from legacy Client Access to ACS and identify the one common item (VBScript macros) that requires manual rework.

• Build and roll out a standardized ACS deployment image per user group using AdminConfig, AutoImport, and a silent/scripted install.

• Identify what can and cannot coexist during a phased migration and plan the cutover accordingly.