ChangeMan ZMF 's application administration facilities are yet another amazing, extremely powerful feature. It's flexibility is one of those things what makes it so much fun for a ChangeMan ZMF admin to be working in the ChangeMan ZMF sphere. You can add library types as much as you want, and extremely fast. Same for designing and implementing a library structure (DSNs related to promotion, baselines and production). Or connecting various ChangeMan ZMF functions (like approve, promote, etc) to selected entities in your security system. Etc, Etc. You can even automate many of those things with the XML services available in ChangeMan ZMF.
User options is one of those great ChangeMan ZMF features (in the product since the beginning), which typically allows any ChangeMan ZMF administrators to fine-tune any staging procedure (which is like a checkin of a source component that needs to be compiled by ChangeMan ZMF also). The actual procedures to compiling components (or variations of compilations) is typically something that differs from any ChangeMan ZMF customer to any other ChangeMan ZMF customers (everybody has their own unique needs and requirements).
The package aging parm is a number of days (set in global admin) that a package should be in BAS status (installed in production) before the meta data of that package (VSAM records stored in CMNPMAST) are allowed to be removed during ChangeMan ZMF housekeeping. The higher this number of days, the more people like IT auditors will like it (they are often the ones who are asking for such high number of days). While many countries have laws that force such data to be kept for (e.g.) 7 years, or even more ...
Staging libraries are the data sets related to a change package in which ChangeMan ZMF stores its changed components. Together with the meta data of the package and the components in it (both stored in ChangeMan ZMF control files like CMNPMAST), they actually constitute the change package. And the ChangeMan ZMF started task (server running on the mainframe) will take care of managing all such staging libraries: they get created (by ChangeMan ZMF) whenever they are needed, and they get removed during housekeeping, after the package became INS/BAS.
Here are some issues about these staging libraries:
A checkout is used to get a copy from the current production version of a component (or variations like the previous version or the upcoming nearly-GA version), so that you can start a new version of it. But what about all those checkout requests that happened long time ago (a few days, weeks, months or years ago), and which are still in the same checkout status (= creating a new version of it has not yet started yet)?
A change package is assumed to contain changed components and/or scratch requests (in 2 decades we have not ever found 1 ChangeMan ZMF customer that's using the rename function, so let's skip that one). Fine, but where do those empty (= no components + no scratch requests) packages come from?
Change packages follow a life cycle, starting from the creation of it, up to the installation of it into production (and optionally followed by a backout it needed). That's the theory, and also what happens most of the time.
However consider some change package that was created by some ChangeMan ZMF user, whereas such package is not yet installed in production (not BAS yet). What happens with such package if the ChangeMan ZMF user quits the company (variation: moves on to another job within the company)?
Anybody knows this issue, which is about all non-BAS packages that have a planned installed date that's somewhere in the past. It's entered on the last panel to create a package, or updated via the U7 panel.
Create a SCMBeans solution to make ChangeMan ZMF create and maintain a Bill Of Material for selected (like source) library types, using a technique that was first introduced in AbitMORE SCM for IDMS/ADSO.
