The Master Terminal

Posted on behalf of Nick.

The Tom Rosamilia and Phil Weintraub ‘Ask z Experts’ session was very well attended – below you can see Mr Zemblowski and Catherine Moxey center back row, Steve next to the linen-suited dapper Mr O’Dowd.

Phil W appears to be taking council from Anthony O’Dowd – no doubt asking why, if the Message Broker can handle scoring at events like Wimbledon and the Ryder Cup why can’t we use it to resolve the integration of a hung Parliament in the UK.

Meanwhile is looks like Tom R is praying that our very own Em James knows the answer.

Looks like Sue has found her badge at last – hope she kept hold of her passport! You don’t want to lose your passport while on a business trip…..

Now look who our intrepid explorers have run in to – our real live genuine CICS Explorer Joe Winchester!

That’s just about it now, flights home on Saturday and back to Hursley next week – must start work on that hit single now we’ve absorbed some American culture.

Posted on behalf of Nick.

Our intrepid CICS Explorers have been checking out the Super Woman’s Reception – I think Tom was expecting lycra and super powers.

While they were there they bumped in to Yvonne Perkins, VP for Enterprise Platform Systems (EPS) who wished to pass their Best of British wishes to her.

After all the socialising it was time to hit the bar and a glass of red, room temperature of course.

Many people you see here are walking around with colourful buttons adorning them (click the image for a close-up).

I must say I liked the Connectivity Cowboy one, although cannot claim any input to that particular badge, but here are the ‘sacks’ of badges waiting to be taken up.

Now it was time to scope out the food – so we went for a closer look.

Then it was off to play the machines.

Some people lose their shirt gambling, this chap lost his head by the look of it!

But Tom and Sue decided to see what they could get with their winnings- is Ford country some kind of music?

Obviously someone got upset because the next thing we know is Security arrived….

We just hope they let us out in time for tomorrows sessions, particularly Phil Wakelins security talk which will include the new feature recently made available for CICS TS V4.1, ID Propagation. Also, what should be an entertaining session from Will Yates – Old stager Vs Greenhorn and a look at how the CICS Explorer can help and for those of you who missed Fraser’s Dynamic Scripting session there’s a repeat!

Posted on behalf of Nick.

So after the excitement of day one and the 200+ attendees to Dave Andrews opening, our intrepid CICS Explorers get down in to the more detailed technical sessions.  To back up the technical sessions, as well as the Ask z Expert sessions, there are demo’s being provided in the IBM System z Software Solutions Suite.

After a quick chat with the CICS Business Partner Supremo, Diane Johnson (@dianegjohnson), it was off to the solution center to see what freebies there were check out all the rich complementary products to the CICS family.

First stop was the Hostbridge stand (doing more with CICS) – nice comfy chair and check out that guitar behind us – looks like a ’57 Les Paul to me

Next we visited those fine people who used to be called Fair Isaac, now known as FICO.

Now with all the new stuff CICS keeps putting in to it’s products it gets increasingly hard to stay up to date with it all, so it’s important that we have companies offering education and instruction of how to take advantage.

So after a hard day around the event it was time for our Explorers to put their feet? up. The ideal solution to this was to relax in one of the bars.

We spent some time analysing what was on offer for Day 3 and saw Catherine Moxey was giving her CICS Events pitch, Fraser had a couple of sessions on CICS Web Services and Service Component Architecture as well as the exciting new announcement from CICS, a session on Dynamic Scripting, there’s an ILOG session from Matt Whitbourne (@mattwhitbourne) and Dan Donnelly as well as further education on CICS Events and implementation.However,  in addition to this there is the Tom Rosamilia session at 16:30 Creating an Agile, Dynamic and Cost-Effective Business With System z. and the ‘Ask z Experts 18:00 session with Tom and Phil Weintraub. Another full day ahead – in the words of that classic Greek philosopher, or was he Roman? Actually I think it the Magic Roundabout…. Zebedee “time for bed….”

I’ve been asked to publish this by Nick, who is just too nice to say no to. No socks were harmed (so far) during the creation of this content but I can assure you they will be given a good talking to when they return from their err.. adventures.

So having shamelessly plugged Impact 2010 on YouTube promo video here we are at Impact 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Venetian Hotel is the setting for most of the sessions and two stars of the Impact promotional videos have taken some time out to give a narrative of the first days proceedings. Sue and Tom have flown over from the Hursley Lab in the UK to be present at this years event along with several others speakers and attendees from the SW Lab in England. Dave Andrews, the CICS Development Director kicked off the CICS Track with a family update, featuring two key announcements made last week. The CICS Transaction Gateway V8 and CICS Dynamic Scripting no-charge feature pack.

Sue and Tom also heard about the exciting new Redbook that is available ‘Smarter Banking with CICS Transaction Server and were seen ‘mugging’ up on the book.

Next up it was time for food.

After lunch it was time to take the Solution tour.

Where upon we came across a nice bright shiny z10 – it’s big it’s black, the mainframes back!!

After that they decided to venture off and investigate the experts.

Here we found the resident CICS Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), Catherine Moxey.

There’s plenty going on here and for Tuesday we have Joe Winchester talking about the CICS Explorer and how it can be extended using the software development kit, Steve Zemblowski talking about upgrading your CICS TS, Catherine (when she’s not in the experts zone) talking about CICS Events, Dan Donnelly talking about ILOG Business Rules solutions and a couple of CICS Tools sessions, one featuring Jim White from Southern California Edison. So before the jet lag kicks in any further it’s off for some rest. 

Everyone has things in their lives that annoy them but instead of working on a solution, they just live with it because they either haven’t thought about it or the workaround is quick enough that it doesn’t really matter that much.

Since I started in CICS almost 5 years ago (has it been that long already!) I’ve always just accepted that if I’d forgotten to activate my VTAM applids before I brought a CICS region up, the quickest course of action was just to activate my applids and restart CICS. Now, I had always just assumed that there was a better way of doing that but there was always something else more important to worry about. So, no idea what we were discussing at the time, but somehow Grant managed to slip the solution to this one into our conversation. Now I am sure this is just the most obvious thing in the world to most of our readers but I thought I’d share the solution anyway.

Read more…

The latest release of the CICS TG plug-in for CICS Explorer is now GENERALLY AVAILABLE here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=1083&uid=swg24022354

Version 2.0 can be used to independently view status of multiple Gateway daemons (z/OS or Multiplatforms) and does not require a connection to a CICS TS 4.1 region, or CICSPlex SM, as was the case in version 1.0.

What’s new in version 2.0

• This latest version of the SupportPac provides the following new or revised views:
  • CICS Transaction Gateway Explorer view
  • Gateway daemons view
  • CICS connections view
  • Console view
• Other features are a customizable Resource column layout for Gateway daemons, CICS connections and Property views, and support for CICS Transaction Gateway for Multiplatforms.

Note: CS05 V2.0 requires CICS Explorer Version 1.0.0.5, which is available to all existing CICS TS V3 and CICS TS V4 license holders.

Please refer to the link above for further details.

There are two really great CICS seminars coming up at the start of March, if you can get to Boston, Massachusetts (March 2nd) or Palisades, New York (March 4th).

So why are they so great? Well let’s just skip over the fact that they are free full-day seminars for the moment. They are also being taught by the IBM Hursley UK lab team, so you can be sure you are going to be in the hands of the experts (infact I see that CICS Distinguished Engineer Ian Mitchell will be one of the main speakers at the seminar, which is about as good as it gets). The seminar is based around the new CICS TS V4.1 release and won’t just be covering the new functionality in the new release but will also be showing you how to extract real value from your CICS regions.

The seminar is split into 3 sessions:

1. Revitalizing Business
2. Revitalizing Applications
3. Simplifying your IT Environment

This is a seminar that is going to introduce you to what I consider to be the most consumable CICS Transaction Server to date. Part of this is about taking your existing assets and very quickly extracting new value without having to change them. The data inside your CICS regions is now more accessible and readily available than ever before, helping your business to be much more pro-active, flexible and adaptable to new opportunities and challenges that may come your way. To help you get there even faster, the CICS tools are there to help analyze and configure your CICS regions so those opportunities and challenges can be identified with ease.

There is a huge amount of new functionality in CICS TS V4.1, from the CICS Explorer, Event Processing, Atom support, SCA and a whole lot more. If you want to find out how to take advantage, then register for the seminar today so you don’t miss out. These are just the first two dates scheduled, look out for more seminars in April!

Full information on the seminar and registration can be found here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/lmi/cics/index.html

There is also a little more information in the PDF for the seminar here:
2010 Revitalizing your CICS

If you have any interest in CICSPlex SM Workload Management (WLM) on CICS you should go check out this new YouTube video now! I’ll leave the video description itself to explain the contents.

This nine minute demo by Dave Williams of CICS Development in Hursley, UK demonstrates some of the performance improvements made in CICS TS V4.1 when using the new Sysplex Optimized WLM function. Throughputs for similar workloads are compared between CICS TS V3.2 and CICS TS V4.1 with Sysplex Optimized WLM switched on and off.

Just to give a little extra background, Dave was the chief developer and does an excellent job here of clearly describing the new improvements.

A slight confession, I wrote the tool the video uses to analyse and chart the workloads. It is an internal IBM test tool, so you can’t get your hands on it, but if you would like to know more or you think it would be useful to you, let me know.

If you are interested in seeing more videos like this, direct from the development team, add a comment, with maybe a sentence or two about what you would like to hear about.

Notes

• For more details on Sysplex Optimized WLM see here.
• Dave used the term ‘Base table’ in the clip. A ‘Base Table’ is more commonly known as a Resource Table. The new table Dave referred to is WLMATARG.
• The tests performed here show an artificial workload running 10,000 transactions using the Distributed Routing mechanism. The results you achieve with your workloads in your environments may differ.

This Wednesday, sees the start of the Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK conference and I’m going to be there along with quite a few other IBM Hursley employees from the CICS team. Assuming there is reasonable internet at the venue, I’m hoping to take some time to blog about the event while I’m there. I’m hoping to get chatting with a quite a few of you as well while I am there so if you want to meet-up for a chat, please get in touch via the blog or on twitter (@chrishodgins), I’ll try to check both as much as I can during the conference. Other than that I should be lurking around at most of the CICS presentations.

The conference has a nice varied agenda covering 9 different streams so there should be lots to take in! The streams are:

1. CICS
2. IMS
3. DB2
4. Enterprise Security
5. MQ
6. Large Systems Working Group
7. Network Management Working Group
8. Software Asset Management
9. New Technologies

I only managed to convince one other sucker colleague from the CICS team to join me for a mugshot on the blog to make it easier to track us down. So without further ado, keep your eyes peeled for one lanky Scotsman (that’s me – left) and Kevin Bowkett (on the right).

Chris Hodgins

Kevin Bowkett

Kevin is a first line manager for CICS with responsibility for Web Services, SCA, Web 2.0 and Java. He has the pleasure of taking the first CICS presentation on Wednesday morning, which is the CICS TS 4.1 overview. This is definitely one to catch so you have a nice grounding for the rest of the CICS presentations over the 2 days.

On the Thursday afternoon, I’ll be presenting on CICS Explorer aka “The new face of CICS”. So please feel free to grab me at any time or after the presentation to have a chat about it.  I’m primarily a CICSPlex SM developer and lately one of the main developers on the CICS Management Client Interface. So if you need to get your head around any of that lot you know where I am. I’m happy to talk about anything else CICS related as well.

Both Kevin and myself will be about on Wednesday and Thursday. So see you there!

Congratulations to all of IBM CICS business partners who received letters of thanks at Share! The letters were presented for sponsorship and support of CICS. I have a lovely collection of photos of the awards being handed out below. In order of appearance we have Calvin Fudge of DataDirect, Guy Givens of H&W, Dan Speer of Hostbridge Technologies and Ed Boulay of Sirius.

DataDirect receiving their letter of thanks

H&W receiving their letter of thanks

Hostbridge Technologies receiving their letter of thanks

Sirius receiving their letter of thanks

Also check out the great DataDirect blog, where they have beaten me to it and published a picture of Calvin Fudge, Director of Marketing for the Shadow Product Group receiving their letter of thanks and shaking hands with CICS director Dave Andrews. They even have an image of the letter of thanks on there as well!

Well done to you all!

Update 24/09/09: Fixed some bad grammar (CH)