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)?
Each change package is assumed to be installed in production (and change its status to INS/BAS) some day. The date entered during package creation is the actual planned install date. But with package update (U7) you can change it again, typically to shift the date to some other (later) date. The idea of that is that it allows you to change your initially planned date (during package create) to somewhere later on. Because while the package content is being developed, it turns out that the date that was originally scheduled is too early. So far no problem ...
ChangeMan ZMF manages various types of datasets, likes staging libraries, promotion-, production- and baseline liraries, etc. Wouldn't it be great to have some type of browser to just browse (or view) any of these datasets from within a single ISPF panel? Maybe also some related datasets like Xnode DSNs, CMN100 reports, etc.?
Publish XML compare reports for identifying differences between any 2 releases of ChangeMan ZMF, such as 7.1 (or 6.1) as compared to 6.1 (or 5.6, 5.5 or 5.3), even to find differences between 2 patch levels (such as ChangeMan ZMF version 7.1.3 versus version 7.1.3.1).
After completing the previous lessons in this course, it will be clear that the XML services in ChangeMan ZMF are an extremely powerful set of functions. But it will also be clear that there are quite a few challenges (missing features, etc) to use these XML services successfully.
To actually start using the XML services, probably the biggest challenge is to become aware (and learn how to use) each of the available XML services.
This lesson starts with providing a functional overview of all available XML services, with an overview organised corresponding to the major ChangeMan ZMF concepts like administration, packages and components. Afterwards some special XML services (utilities and transfer facilities) are explained.
To actually start using the XML services, probably the biggest challenge is to become aware (and learn how to use) each of the available XML services.