It has been a bit quiet here on the posting front lately…. No excuses really, but I’ll make one anyway…. We have all been working hard on CICS TS 4.2 which was announced yesterday. You can read the announcement letter here.

If you want to have a play with CICS TS 4.2, an Open Beta program is running, for details and to sign up go here.

Any questions on CICS TS 4.2, feel free to post them as comments to this append, and we can try our best to answer them for you.

Oh, and if you want to check out the Beta CICS TS 4.2 Information Center, check it out here.

So as a CICS TS customer, what does this mean for you? Well, in addition to potentially getting your hand on some new capability in 2011, another thing it could mean for you is that now might be a really good time to start talking to us (and perhaps reminding us) about all those features, functions and enhancements that you want us to put in a future version of CICS TS!

We do of course already have a well defined requirements management process, alongside many other methods of gathering and analysing customer requirements. However, this time round we wanted to do something more – and that is what this post is all about.

We have built a survey containing six questions that we hope will uncover some requirements that we in the lab might not have come across before. The overall theme of the survey is about how CICS TS can do more to make our customers lives easier – something that hopefully we all want – and so the requirements can be big or small, so long as they are something you or your colleagues would benefit from.

These are the three main questions we would like you to think about:

1. If IBM were designing the next CICS TS specifically for your organisation, what content (features and functions) would you like it to contain?
2. Are there any custom written CICS capabilities/utilities (Exits, URM’s, Scripts, etc.) that you would rather IBM implemented natively in CICS TS?
3. Are there any other no-charge custom CICS capabilities/utilities (IBM SupportPacs, etc.) that augment your CICS TS environment with?

Here is a link to the full on-line survey: www.surveymonkey.com/s/CICSReqs2011

The survey also contains three additional open questions: what do you like about CICS TS; what do you dislike about CICS TS; and space for you to tell us anything else you would like us to know. All responses will be included in our planning process and each and every one of them will be looked at and considered.

Ian and I are appealing to all of our CICS TS customers to spend a little bit of time considering and submitting their responses. Perhaps you could even involving other departments with an interest in CICS TS (those AD guys that you SP folks do not always talk to perhaps?).

You never know, in the not too distant future, you might be very glad you did!

Cheers,

Andrew Bates, Product Manager, CICS Transaction Server for z/OS
Ian Mitchell, Chief Architect, CICS Transaction Server for z/OS

IBM System z Software Webcast

Webcast April 21, 2010, 11:00 EDT*** Please note EDT Timing ***

Smarter banking with CICS TS V4.1

The industry and analyst studies are piling up and they all arrive at the same conclusion:

Aligning business and IT efforts can double the productivity gains of those efforts done individually. This alignment also enables businesses to deliver the right information in the right context, tailored to individual needs. But redesigning decades of existing code and solutions is not a viable approach to process improvement. How do you approach building a successful and scalable smarter banking initiative non-invasively?

From an organizational perspective, the enterprise needs horizontal visibility as well as appropriate skills to manage the business and IT operational environments. From a technological perspective, the enterprise needs a platform that will scale with the success of the bank, as well as continuously ensure the integrity and reliability of business processes and services. Providing end-to-end process visibility on a high-performance horizontal transaction processing platform will be a key differentiator for successful enterprises in their drive toward smarter banking.

Join us for this complimentary webcast to learn how IBM CICS® Transaction Server V4.1 can deliver the highly scalable agile infrastructure transaction processing fundamentals needed, along with advanced capabilities like business event emission, and ATOM feeds as a great starting point toward providing a solid foundation for the future.

In this session, we will discuss how CICS TS V4.1 and complementary WebSphere® solutions support smarter banking by helping you:

• Gain insight into business processes and respond by modifying key business applications quickly and with confidence
• Comply with corporate, industry and government policies to manage business risk of critical business applications
• Control costs by simplifying IT infrastructure and improving development and operational productivity through easier-to-use interfaces and functions

Register now for this webcast here.

Speakers:

• Claus T. Jensen, Senior Technical Staff Member and Chief Architect, Architectural Synergies and Lifecycles, IBM Software Group
• Alison Lucas, CICS TS Communications Software Developer, IBM Software Group

Broadcast date: April 21, 2010, 11 a.m., EDT

Developed for: IT and enterprise architects, IT managers, and industry solutions analysts and managers

Technical level: Intermediate

Join us after the webcast for a live question-and-answer session. This webcast will also be available for replay after the event.

If you are reading this blog you are probably working somewhere that uses IBM mainframes and may be interested in helping to ensure that university students have had a taste of the mainframe (or -sorry Chris – proper computing as I call it).

So if you or your organisation has relationships with UK universities, then please make sure that they are aware of the upcoming UK Student Mainframe Contest. This is a really good way for UK university students to learn about System z.

If students participate and they get through the early challenges they will get their mitts on CICS and other z/OS software… Though the chance of winning a Sony Playstation 3 might be more of an incentive than getting first hand use of CICS .

You probably don’t need a reminder, but there is a nice shiny new release over here in the form of CICS TS 4.1

So what is new in CICS IA 3.1 ?

• CICS TS V4.1 support
• CICS Explorer plugin
• Command Flow
• Natural/Adabas support
• Concurrent Dependency and Affinity data collection
• … and lots more

CICS IA 3.1 is planned to be available on Friday the 4th of September.

While we’re not expecting people to camp out in front of IBM, like they do for the latest new phone/gadget, today is the day that CICS TS 4.1 hits the ‘streets’.

CICS Explorer is also available for download here: CICS TS V4 or CICS TS V3. You will need an IBMID to get to the downloads, but if you don’t have one, you can register via these links.

You can find the presentation in PDF format here:

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/htp/cics/presentations/CICS_TS_in_your_SOA_-_Links_-_Issue_4.pdf

Thanks to Andrew Bates for continuing to keep us all up to date with latest information!

A couple of videos are available:

Technical Overview:

Business Value:

If you have any questions, go over to the I ♥ CICS facebook group, or collar one of the CICS team attending Share, or add a comment to this post.

There is now a SupportPac (CA1S) available for download that allows PHP scripting capabilities. By offering PHP on CICS Transaction Server Version 3.2, CICS is providing another option for opening up yet more of your enterprise CICS application to simple HTTP access from a diverse range of service requesters.

The SupportPac complements an earlier offering SupportPac CA8K, which provides the capability to deliver CICS data as Atom Feeds. You can use the PHP scripting language capabilities in CA1S, which are shared with WebSphere sMash, to extend the range of CICS assets that can be exposed as REST services. For more information click here. There is a short 8 minute demo of the capabilities and potential of combining CICS, Atom feeds, PHP scripting and Smash for a mashup – you can view it here.

CICS Support for events:

CICS has the potential to be a prolific producer of business events and with the recent SupportPac CB11, CICS TS v3 can produce events for consumption by WebSphere Business Events (WBE). This SupportPac provides an example of emission of events from CICS TS for z/OS. It allows the user to start identifying the places in processing within CICS applications where significant business events occur, and to see how the power of WebSphere Business Events (WBE) can be harnessed to carry out correlation and pattern matching on these events. For further information please click here.