Bev Weaver knows her stuff, and she is pretty opinionated. (Take her aside one day and ask her what she thinks of NPF, IBM's old TCPIP printing product. But be prepared to blush!)
This session talked about the changes in VPS 7.0 (we're running
version 6.2), and some of the goodies in the coming release. I
was hoping to find out some information about the forthcoming
SAPI support.
SAPI is the "Sysout API", which IBM began supporting in OS/390
release 3. It is a highly superior interface to the JES spool,
providing multitasking and access to much more information than
was possible using the old external writer interface (used by
VPS). When VPS learns to use SAPI it ought to run faster, and
it will also obviate the need to use some buggy exit code that
LRS provides to dig information out of the JES2 address space
that is not provided by the external writer interface.
Alas, SAPI delivery keeps slipping and slipping, and now it seems
that it will not become generally available until release 7.1
comes around: probably third quarter of this year. So do we
have any reason to implement VPS release 7.0? Maybe...
If you want to implement VMCF, release 7.0 seems to be the way to go. VMCF is a set of ISPF panels that control VPS printers. Years ago it was fairly clunky, and I never saw a need to put it up here. It had some security exposures, and required a user SVC so that VMCF could become authorized on demand. Release 7.0 has addressed these issues. Security is now being handled by calls to RACF, and LRS has created a "server" address space to handle calls to authorized services, which were formerly done by VMCF itself.
Release 7.0 also has some performance benefit, since it now a high performance interface provided by TCPIP 3.2. But I'm a little afraid of TCPIP, and what we have works for us now. So I'm inclined to err on the side of caution.
Bev Weaver talked a little about their new "Page Center" product. This appears to be a report management / distribution program, with a MS-Windows GUI front end. I don't see a huge requirement for this yet, and I was a little disappointed in their implementation in any case. They register users in a proprietary database, and those users have proprietary little "mailboxes" that they have to check periodically. When Page Center processes output for a user, it "mails" a notice that the output is available for viewing. I asked if they would consider using a real mail system, something that was smtp-compliant, and Bev Weaver just sighed. "We've sort of talked about it, but there are no plans right now. We have so much to do yet."