Release 6.05

October 09, 2001

USS Action (new product beta)

Action Software International is introducing a new product, USS Action.

USS Action will track and control changes to Hierarchical File System (HFS) files used by OS/390 and z/OS UNIX System Services (USS).

USS Action is a separately chargeable product, available now as a beta release for testing by North American Change Action users, and is provided together with Change Action Version 6.05. Participants in the USS Action beta program will be expected to provide feedback regarding the results of their testing. Sites who participate in the beta testing will receive the following benefits:

the First Year License Fee will be waived (free) and
regardless of the List Price for the USS Action product, a base annual renewal fee of $2000 per site for the second and subsequent years which would not be increased by more than 10% in any year.

The USS Action product will look very similar to Change Action except that dataset and member will be replaced by directory and file name.

The first beta release of this product, available now, records statistics and changed data, and allows compare, reporting, and restoration of HFS files.

The next phase will add change controls and reference tracking for HFS files.

If you would like to participate in the beta test, please call Action Software International at (905) 470-7113 for more information.

Excludes feature

ENHANCEMENTS: The Excludes feature can now be used to bypass Automatic Change Distribution. Prior to this release you could exclude the following:

Recording of Change Stats
Backups
Change Action Controls
Reference Tracking

Change Requests

ENHANCEMENT: A new option has been added at the OID Level Only panel 4 of 4 to automatically test for conflicting Change Requests when a new Change Request is saved.

As well, under the OID Level Only Options there is a facility available for sending messages to one or more users when a data set under an OID is changed. Now an option has been added to send Email for each and every change made to the datasets under the OID. This new option, 'Send Email for all Changes', is available on the OID Level Only panel 1 of 4.

External Logging

ENHANCEMENT: The following new subtype has been added to External Logging. These records are also recorded in the Change Action database as audit records.

Subtype 0C: Updates to OID Level Options.

ENHANCEMENT: Subtypes 08, 09, 0A, 0B and 0C are for updates to options in Change Action. You can now provide a User Group name for one or more of these subtypes. When a specific option is updated and a User Group name is provided for the subtype, then a detailed e-mail message will be sent to the users in the User Group.

NOTE: To make use of this enhancement, user information for the intended message recipients (including e-mail addresses) must exist in the Change Action database.

Reference Tracking By Members (RTM)

ENHANCEMENT: An OID Administrator (for any OID) can now add any member for RTM. A user can delete a member for RTM only if the member was defined by that user. A Global Administrator can add or delete any member.

Automatic Scheduling

ENHANCEMENT: You may now get notification messages from the automatic scheduler in e-mail form. If you have the e-mail support enabled in the global options, then each user may direct certain messages to either TSO, e-mail, both or none; this was implemented in an earlier release. Now, however, the notification messages that the scheduler sends can also be sent via e-mail.

By default, any requested scheduler messages are sent to the owner of the job or function. The third panel of the schedule definition contains a field where a userid may be specified if you wish to direct these messages to someone other than the owner; this field now also accepts a user group name so that you may send messages to more than a single user. Remember that jobs defined under the group name GLOBAL have messages sent to all global administrators unless overridden in this schedule definition field.

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