April 20, 2026 Alex Woodie
Big Blue hasn’t yet announced its spring IBM i Technology Refresh (TR), which we told you last week will come a bit later this year to align with IBM’s expected announcement of a new entry-level, P05-class Power11 machine. But that didn’t stop IBM from making other IBM i-related announcements last week, including some important updates to BRMS and the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) email client.
With its update for Backup, Recovery, and Media Services for i (BRMS), which IBM announced on April 14, IBM is bolstering the new Web GUI with updated capabilities that will make the product more useful and easier to use. Specifically, IBM is allowing users to perform save and restore operations at the library and the IFS level in the new GUI. In a future release, IBM says it will provide the capability to perform save and restore operations at the file and object level from the Web interface.
This is a big improvement for users who want to work within a Web GUI as opposed to the traditional ways of interacting with the product, which is through command line, APIs, or SQL commands. The new GUI, which is based on the Angular JavaScript library, replaces the old Web GUI that was launched with the original IBM Navigator product and which faces big limitations – in addition to the little matter of that Log4j security vulnerability.
IBM elected to keep the Web GUI for BRMS separate from the new Navigator, which provides ways for users to interact with their IBM i environment, and also contains screens for working with specific products, such as PowerHA, the Advanced Job Scheduler, and Performance Data Investigator (PDI). While users can pull up the new BRMS Web GUI form a bookmark in Navigator, IBM elected to keep the GUIs separate primarily as a way to avoid dependencies.
“Sometimes it’s good to have modular type designs where you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket,” IBM i engineer Kris Whitney told IT Jungle, “and it allows you to go faster because you can develop independently.”
There is another rationale behind updating the GUI for BRMS at this point in time: Encouraging BRMS version 1 users to upgrade to BRMS version 2.
IBM still has a large number of customers running on the legacy BRMS version 1, which is no longer supported. According to IBM, more than half of all BRMS users are on the old version. The splashy new GUI should provide an enticement for version 1 users to make the move to version 2. It should also make BRMS easier to use in general, Whiteny said.
“We are trying to reinvigorate them and say, hey, we’ve actually innovated on BRMS quite a bit since we discontinued VR1, and there’s reasons to jump to VR2,” he said. “There’s also still a large segment of the customers that don’t use BRMS because they deem it too difficult because it’s too robust and they have to set it up. So the GUI is going to be important to bring on new BRMS customers.”
The new GUI is also enabling new uses cases that IBM has envisioned around centralizing backups for on-prem and cloud environments, Whitney said.
“It does a bunch of stuff in the cloud,” he added. “Cloud backup is a little more complicated than on prem, and so that’s why we are trying to highlight BRMS more than we probably have in the last few years. That’s been one of those projects that’s just kind of taken for granted.”
The update for the SMTP client brings one significant new feature: Support for OAuth 2.0 for IBM i version 7.4 and later for Gmail (Google Workspace) and Office 365 (Microsoft 365) providers.
Email providers are moving away from passwords and starting to require OAuth tokens for user authentication. IBM implemented the change in the IBM i SMTP client to ensure that the integration remains seamless.
Some IBM i customers use the SMTP client to relay email to Gmail and Office 365 email servers, so that emails originating from the IBM i server (such as ones programmatically generated by IBM i applications) appear instead to come from the Google or Microsoft email servers.
In the past, IBM i administrators could set up the authentication for this integrating with user names and passwords. But Google and Microsoft have both moved away from allowing their users to authenticate using passwords and are now requiring OAuth 2.0 tokens. IBM’s support for OAuth 2.0 keeps the SMTP client current within the requirements of Google and Microsoft.
However, there is still a bit of administration work that IBM i users must do to complete the configuration with OAuth 2.0. Users must create an IFS file with the provider-specific OAuth 2.0 authentication information in JSON format, according to IBM’s instructions. Even though there is still some work involved to set it up, users still should be happy that IBM is finally supporting this requirement.
IBM expects to ship the PTFs for SMTP OAuth 2.0 support by June 19. Keep a look out for them – or better yet, read Doug Bidwell’s IBM i PTF Guide to make sure you never miss an update from IBM.
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