My name is John Knutson and I am the Marketing Manager for IBM's CICS Tools. Over the past couple of years, I have been working with the CICS Explorer and CICS Tools development teams at IBM Hursley, to create what we call The New Face of CICS.
It's been a busy couple of years. We first went public with a Statement Of Direction issued in August 2008, followed by a launch webcast, a public forum, and the first Supportpac delivery of CICS Explorer and plug-ins for three CICS Tools on November 5 the same year. Three further updates to the SupportPacs were then followed during the fisrt half of 2009.
In June 2009, Generally Available, fully supported versions of the CICS Explorer base available to all CICS TS V3 and V4 customers. The GA version added update and control and the ability to connect directly to a CICS region without using CICSPlex SM when used with CICS TS V4.1, along with an easy to use Event Binding editor and initial support for the new CICS ATOM feeds. Supported and updated plug-ins for new versions of CICS Interdependency Analyzer, CICS Performance Analyzer, and CICS Configuration Manager were delivered between April and September. Round about the same time a SupportPac with a CICS Transaction Gateway plug-in, and an OPAL submission for OMEGAMON XE for CICS were published.
More updates were delivered in September (including support to maintain CSD-based resources in CICS TS V4.1) and a new release with further updates will ship later this week. In October, a developer-oriented CICS Explorer was integrated with Rational Developer for System z which also provides an integration point for the CICS Tools plug-ins, allowing them to be used in conjunction with RDz and its IBM Problem Determination Tools plug-ins. In addition, the Debug Tool V10 ships a DTCN replacement plug-in that can be used along with the CICS Explorer, and a PTF adding the same support to Debug Tool V9 will soon be available. We've also just published the final version of the CICS Explorer Redbook, and we are putting the final touches to another Redbook showing how you can Extend the CICS Explorer yourself.
Delivering quarterly updates across such a broad range of products may seem like a pretty gruelling schedule for a relatively small development team and you may wonder how they manage to do so much, so frequently. I think the answer lies in our use of an Agile process which the team has embraced fully and which should help us to maintain, and possibly increase our pace as we head into 2010.
We're not going to reproduce all of the inforamtion and discussions available elsewhere, so we've listed some important links over on the right-hand side of the page, including one to our download site, where you can access the CICS Explorer and all available plug-ins.
If you have comments or questions, feel free to add comments to this or any of the other posts.
John Knutson, Marketing Manager - CICS Tools
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