Sometimes a certain group of ChangeMan ZMF users (like ChangeMan ZMF admins, release managers, …) need to perform a special operation (usually planned, though sometimes unplanned). To do so, it may be that during such operations certain ChangeMan ZMF operations (e.g.: package freeze, package approve, revert to DEV, etc) cannot be used by any ChangeMan ZMF user. Shutting down ChangeMan ZMF entirely obviously is an option. But what about those situations where just shutting down the entire ChangeMan ZMF system (for a few hours or so in the middle of the day?) is not an option?

Here are a few samples where this requirement pops up:

• Do not allow any extra FRZ packages anymore to be added to a set of packages that are assumed to belong to a certain release, if such FRZ-request comes in less then 7 days before the release will be installed in production (this will assure a certain stability in a frozen QA-promotion target during those 7 days).
• Similar to the previous sample, do not allow FRZ packages (belonging to a release) to be reverted anymore if it is too close to the production activation of the release.

A variation of this are some (usually unplanned …) activities due to which package (final) approvals must be prevented from happening. This because of situations like:

• Some maintenance activity is going on at a (remote) production site, due to which all package distributes and/or install would fail anyway. Or even worse: some other software (like FTP software, your DBMS, etc) is not available due to a planned or unplanned outage.
• You want to enforce package approvals to be within certain (business?) hours of each workday.
• For some business related reason (e.g. the credit crisis …), an unplanned frozen period needs to be enforced right away, to ensure that not any update will happen in the production environment.

For those situations where just shutting down the entire ChangeMan ZMF system (for a few hours or so in the middle of the day?) is not an option, consider the approach to disable certain ChangeMan ZMF functions and/or packages, as documented in the Z-Clues (login required).