Some light reading: CICS DA, SIT parameters, blogging and z/Journal links

A very random collection of CICS links today.

A new tool has just been added to the CICS portfolio. The all shiny and new CICS Deployment Assistant. Congratulations to Grant and everyone else involved on releasing a great new tool!

CICS Deployment Assistant can discover, model, visualize, and deploy new and existing CICS regions, using automation and policy-driven advice built on your own and IBM’s knowledge and experience, giving you access to the latest IBM CICS technology faster and easier than ever before.

Two interesting new APAR (CICS APAR PM15583 and CICSPlex SM APAR PM15214) have also been released for CICS TS V4.1. When applied together, they provide access to the cold-start CICS SIT parameters via the CICSPlex SM API and the CICS Management Client Interface (CMCI). They will allow you to find out not only what value each regions SIT parameters were set to but also where they were set. Very handy for problem determination or just keeping track of your environment.

If you read z/Journal you may have spotted CICSPlex SM developer Dave Williams 3 excellent articles:

• An Implementation Fast Path for CICSPlex SM
• CICS Task History Recording
• CICS Sysplex Optimized Workload Routing

You might notice there are some new sharing options on the blog now as well. At the bottom of every post you should now be able to simply click a button to share the post to twitter or Facebook.

Finally, a new blog focussing on WebSphere and CICS support has also just been created over on developerWorks. I’ve also added the blog to our bookmarks below.