Micro Focus’ commitment to customer success is enshrined in its regular drops of exciting new technology. Amie Johnson takes us through the latest mainframe product set updates, out this week.
Introduction
Micro Focus’ commitment to improving z Systems application delivery bore more fruit this week in the form of a new update to its Enterprise Product Set. For customers with strategic mainframe applications, the Enterprise Solution set helps you manage complex business workloads with an eye toward future innovation and market change.
You Asked For It
This latest iteration of the Micro Focus mainframe delivery technology, version 2.3.1, comprises a number of new capabilities. By listening during the many dozens of mainframe modernization engagements we’re involved in at any given time, we continue to focus on the things that matter the most to our market.
Common themes emerging from the mainframe modernization projects we’ve worked on can be summarized in two simple phrases:
- Our client’s core mainframe applications don’t just support the business, they ARE the business. We have customers successfully running and modernizing COBOL and PL/I applications because they are the secret ingredients that make them better than the competition.
- When it comes to addressing the changes that must be made to remain relevant and successful in today’s fierce global market, the risks associated with modernization, and the cost and time to change, must be as low as possible, but with great results.
- Learn more about Mainframe Application Modernization.
What’s In The Box
Let’s explore a few of the newly available capabilities in this iteration of our Enterprise Analyzer, Enterprise Developer, Enterprise Test Server and Enterprise Server products.
Extra Mobility:
As we help our customers continue to deliver incremental value through IT, making our products easy to use is vital. This is why one of the key features of this update makes web-enabling CICS applications much easier. CICS Web Services are important to mainframe customers as they look to mobile-enable their existing applications to support new business need. In 2.3.1 we have further enhanced our ability to support customers in developing, testing and deploying CICS Web Services. Additionally, using Enterprise Test Server, clients can establish multi-user testing of CICS Web Services applications, without needing to consume additional mainframe MIPS.
Well-Managed:
Whether it’s to support web or mobile users, our customers need to modernize and extend existing applications to support the latest way consumers access their services. An example of how we support this is the Micro Focus Enterprise Server for .NET, which enables our customers to deploy their COBOL applications as Managed Code. For customers with a Microsoft-centric strategy that want to integrate their existing applications with other services, this creates the option of extending COBOL applications using other managed code languages such as C#. CICS applications in a managed code, even Cloud-based environment, is readily-accessible.
COBOL Forever:
We pride ourselves on being the best mainframe development environment, and as such compatibility with IBM’s Enterprise COBOL remains a priority. We have made enhancements in our support for Enterprise COBOL 5.2 and are currently reviewing the new functions in COBOL 6 for inclusion in a future release of Enterprise Developer.
Subsytem Support:
Mainframe compatibility is a priority for our rehost customers so in addition to the Enterprise COBOL and CICS Web Services support already mentioned we have also delivered updates to our PL/I, IMS and DB2 support to further improve our compatibility with the mainframe and reduce the requirement for application changes when rehosting to Enterprise Server.
However, the list of what to expect in this latest drop from our regular product release schedule is considerably longer. Additional functionality highlights we’ve delivered based on our customers’ needs include:
- Faster access to application knowledge through improved usability and better performance on large Enterprise Analyzer repositories.
- Code coverage colorization to help developers quickly identify application code that has not been executed during testing cycles.
- Incorporation of coding standards rules into continuous integration environments enabling easier use across development teams.
- Increased access security to mainframe resources through support for ‘pass tickets.’
- Reduced elapsed time for batch processes through improved sorting of Fixed Block files.
Where Can I get it?
Customers that are current on maintenance for any of these products can login and download updates from the SupportLine web portal. You can also access the release notes from the Product Documentation area on SupportLine and the Enterpise Analyzer and Enterprise “What’s new” documents from the main Micro Focus Web site.
Contact us for further information if you would like to upgrade your current product to receive this latest update.
