It was with great pleasure I attended a vibrant Federal User Group last week. With so many advances and improvements in the past 12 months, Federal agencies and system integrators showed enthusiastic interest in the evolution of our Orchestrated ALM solutions – Requirements Manager, Development Manager and Release Manager. Within the Federal government, as in many enterprise IT organizations, there is a continued need to drive efficiency and transparency across both Application

It’s been one month since Serena launched Dimensions CM 12.2, and for IT organizations struggling to balance faster delivery with greater control, CM 12.2 has been an early holiday gift! As I’ve been meeting with customers these last few weeks, I’ve been hearing some very positive feedback from those trying out the latest release. 

• “The combination of better traceability reports offered by Dimensions CM and new reversible headers features will make the adoption of the CM platform from PVCS much easier.”
• “The performance numbers from Dimensions CM 12.2 look very promising.  Anything that is done to reduce the amount of time required to deliver changes

During “The Kitchen Sink + Everything About the New HFS/JAVA Support in ChangeMan ZMF” VUG session on December 7, John Skelton did a great job taking us through the implementation of Java support in ZMF as well as support for the USS, HFS and zFS file systems. In this presentation John went into deep technical detail of the ZMF v7 design objectives, the architectural changes, the approach from each client type (ISPF, ZDD, Eclipse), how to build Java components, building JAR files and getting Java applications into ZMF. 

For those who attended the VUG, we would like to apologize for a couple of technical issues.  While the content that John provided was excellent, there were glitches in the execution

In my last post I took you through the history of ChangeMan ZMF during the time it underwent several name changes.  ‘Change Man’ became ‘ChangeMan,’ which turned into ‘ChangeMan ZMF’ at version 5.  Here I continue to trace the evolution and revolution of ChangeMan ZMF through to present day version 7.  

In the planning phase of version 6, and with the growing popularity of Web Services, we could no longer assume that requests coming into ZMF were simply from TSO users as in the past. With product integrations, web service calls embedded in

“Evolution not revolution” – Have the changes and upgrades made to Serena’s mainframe software change and configuration management solution, ChangeMan ZMF, been an evolution or a revolution? The ZMF development team has been cranking out new features over the last couple of years: fully integrated Java support (including Impact Analysis, Audit, Build, ISPF, Eclipse, zDD, XML and Web services); HFS and zFS support for Development, Staging, Promotion and Baseline libraries; a new Eclipse Plug-in that

During the “Ask the Experts” session at the Serena Mainframe Virtual User Group meeting earlier this month, a few questions about the newest version of ChangeMan ZMF went unanswered due to the lack of time.  Mark Levy, Serena Software Mainframe product manager, and I went through them and provide the answers here.

Q: For ChangeMan ZMF v6, the product moved from DB2 to linear VSAM.  What are the benefits and risks that you have seen? 

A: In ChangeMan ZMF v6, the Impact Analysis function was moved from being based on DB2 to a z/OS data space, backed by linear VSAM.

Today I had the good fortune to meet with Ashley Owen.  As part of the Serena product team that directs and develops our Orchestrated ALM product solutions, he is ideally placed to define the “Orchestrating the Entire Application Lifecycle” track content for xChange, Serena’s annual user conference from September 19-21, 2011.  Here is how our conversation went.

KP: This is a pretty big track; it covers the entire lifecycle from demand

Today, Serena announced the availability of Serena Dimensions CM 12, the newest and most powerful version of our software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. Over the years, Dimensions CM has earned a reputation for being one of the fastest integrated ALM solutions on the market and has helped thousands of customers increase development efficiencies, lower development costs and risks and ensure compliance to standards. The new version builds on these merits, providing release managers with dramatically improved processes around release management in the convenience of a single console for viewing, scheduling and executing release deployments and rollbacks.

While releasing applications into

Most organizations figured out a long time ago that instilling some level of governance and control over application source code (your business applications running on the mainframe) was a very good idea. This governance: 

• Saves costs, drives revenue and mitigates risk.
• Provides traceability for changes.
• Moves artifacts through a lifecycle of structure and rigor.
• And most importantly – it protects production. 

Yet as sound as this is, I’m amazed at how the other half of the mainframe is open and unprotected.   By and large, most firms don’t have any change governance in place against the system software (the software that’s