Sad news about Grant Shayler

We are deeply saddened to inform the MasterTerminal community of the death of Grant Shayler. He died on 29th October 2011, aged 42. We have delayed this news until his loving sister and father have been able to deal with his affairs and return him to his native land of New Zealand.

Grant was a prolific contributor to this blog, both as a contributor of original articles, and as a respondent to Ask a Question. He also actively participated in the CICS-L mailing list. His depth of knowledge of CICS was outstanding.

Grant joined IBM in 1989. He was initially a tester of the CICS Security restructure, but his security expertise was so extensive that he became an honorary member of the design team. The complex table of CICS ISC userid selection was Grant’s creation.

He temporarily moved to WebSphere MQ to perform a similar service there.

Grant returned to CICS in the CICSPlex/SM Change Team, and later became a lead architect and developer for CICSPlex/SM for many years. In the last few years he led the team that brought in the CICS Deployment Assistant.

Grant was greatly respected by his friends and colleagues in the CICS and CPSM Development and Change Teams, both for his technical knowledge and for his friendly, helpful, and approachable character. He will be deeply missed by us all.

Calling all CICS customers – a request from Andrew and Ian

Historically, we here in Hursley have delivered new releases of CICS TS to the marketplace approximately every two years or so. Given that our last major release – CICS Transaction Server for z/OS V4.1 – was made generally available in 2Q 2009, it might be safe to assume that based on historical delivery cycles, 2011 could be exciting year for CICS TS announcements…

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

Need help on CICS? Want to talk to other peers about CICS?

Kristine Harper’s “Newbie” Blog mentions several Listserv groups that deal with the mainframe. If you look after CICS there is also a Listserv available which is actually a VERY active group of people – and a very knowledgeable community as well. It is hosted by the University of Georgia.

You can either subscribe to the CICS List or browse or search the archive. To have a look for details just visit the site.

Blogging CICS

Last year I went on the hunt to find other like-minded people who work with an IBM product called CICS Transaction Server. A quick search found the CICS-L mailing list that I’ve been subscribing to for a while but I noticed there was a very limited supply of CICS bloggers out there. There is a wealth of knowledge on CICS-L but it is difficult to get a real feel for the community. So in an attempt to change things we have started this blog in a hope that it will encourage other CICS users to follow suit. Let us know if you do and we will add you to the CICS bloggers list on the right-hand menu so others can find you.

This unofficial blog is written by a hopefully expanding group of people in IBM Hursley and beyond who work on CICS. Expect to see posts on conferences, code samples, helpful hints and anything else that we can think of. If you have anything you would like us to talk about or any questions you are just dying to know the answer to please let us know in the comments and we will do our best to answer them.