The Maximo specialist Swiss Army Knife

Have you ever felt at war during the roll-out of a complex customization or when you have to rush to debug and fix a complex problem? Sometimes being a Maximo specialist is like being a soldier. That’s why you need the best tool at hand to do your job. That’s why I have selected my personal set of portable apps that I have copied on my USB stick so I can plug in every computer in order to quickly become productive on every system. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Here is my selection of free (or almost free) tools.

• Notepad++: A powerful and free text editor that supports UNIX/DOS file formats, column mode editing, filesystem search, macros, source formatters and more…
• 7zip: Probably the best free file compression/archiver. WinRAR and WinZip are not really free and are less flexible or less powerful.
• DBVisualizer: An outstanding universal SQL client. Unfortunately it not completely free. Try the DBVisualizer Personal evaluation license and you will never leave it. A valid free alternative is SQuirreL.
• Postman REST Client: A Chrome plugin to play with HTTP calls against the Maximo Integration Framework. If you are a Firefox user then try HTTPRequester.
• SoapUI: A test tool useful to simulate HTTP and WebServices calls. A must have for developing MIF integrations.
• JD: A small and accurate Java decompiler is often useful to understand the inner behavior of Maximo classes.
• BareTail: A simple a tail program for Windows to look at Maximo logs in realtime.
• FileZilla: Open Source FTP client when you have to transfer files from/to UNIX servers.
• portaPuTTY: The portable version of the famous Telnet/SSH client.
• Beyond Compare: A great tool to compare files and directories. It isn’t free but worth the price. A good free alternative is WinMerge.
• IrfanView: Simple and fast image viewer.
• TreeSizeFree: When you need to free some disk space this may prove useful.