FWIW, I keep hearing the same things from customers: 1. They want SMP/E. They don't like vendor- or product-specific procedures. Even if they're good ones, it's too much trouble to deviate from the standard. Time is precious, and it's nice to learn one way well.
2. They want more thoughtful SMP/E designs (and documentation) for each product. It is possible to make any SMP/E procedure easy or hard. One example I remember is WebSphere Host On-Demand, which originally had a "just dump these files to HFS, change the Domino Go HTTP for z/OS config, ..." installation procedure. It was all manual. Then (Version 3? 4?) SMP/E packaging came into being, but we techies wrestled with that for a couple versions until the product team figured out how to do it right, including the tape ordering and shipment mechanics. Nowadays it's pretty slick as the SMP/E packaging got more refined and the delivery mechanisms improved, including electronic delivery for both original versions and patches. There were lots of incremental improvements along the way for operational convenience that wouldn't be appreciated without some mainframe experience, many of which my customers recommended and that we implemented. I think it's certainly OK for software vendors to bring new products to z/OS and worry less about SMP/E as they start. (I'd rather have the products available than wait for the absolute finest SMP/E packaging.) But as a product matures this is a good area to improve, because it makes everybody's job easier (including the vendor's). Are there any "exceptional" examples of SMP/E packaging that people would point to as "the best"? Perhaps that would help educate vendors, because a lot of them do probably scratch their heads wondering if SMP/E is worth it during their early development phases. Finally (and wondering aloud), there's this big "New Face of z" effort, as evidenced by such things as the no-charge IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for z/OS Management Console. Maybe there's room here for some new SMP/E face. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
