Scope: USA, Brazil and Canada based DXC data centers and supported client data centers.
Effective Date: March 14th, 2022
Group Name: AMS Leveraged Mainframe CICS Support (USA, Brazil and Canada)
Affected Locations:
USA - Cherokee, Charlotte, Dallas (SYF), Nissan, Plano, Sao Paulo, Tulsa and XPO.
Brazil - Sao Paulo
Canada - MCC, SCC and Calgary
Summary:
CICS Transaction Server 5.6 will be the next version of CICS Transaction Server to
become the standard software offering by DXC.
Justification:
The current standard offering by DXC of CICS Transaction Server, release 5.6, is
released in Jun 12, 2020 and CICS 5.4 goes out of support on December 31st, 2023.
CICS Transaction Server 5.6 is released by IBM new and improved functionality.
Upgrading now will allow users to exploit newer technologies not available in Transaction
Server 5.4
and will ensure continued software currency for years to come.
Benefits to Users:
The following are some of the new release highlights:
Developer experience
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o New support for Pivotal Spring Boot
o New support for Jakarta EE 8
o Enhanced CICS Java API
o New Maven Central libraries for CICS Java application development
o New plug-ins for Maven and Gradle to automate building CICS bundles
o New deployment API to simplify CICS bundle deployment during development
o New support for Node.js version 12, 14, and 16
Security
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o Enhanced support for CICS TS as an HTTP client when using TLS
o Enhanced VERIFY TOKEN command to process JSON Web Tokens
o New CICS monitoring for security domain
Resilience
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o Improved reporting and action for z/OS short-on-storage conditions
o Improved usage of BAS data space storage for large CICSPlex environments
o Improved management of CICSPlex® System Manager data space usage
o Support for COMMAREAs up to 32 KB on distributed program links
Management
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o New and enhanced system programming interfaces to assist with JVM server
administration
o New Policy system rule types
o New z/OS workload management health policy action
o New support for IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator
Details:
Affected sites should ensure that locally supported products are compatible
with CICS Transaction Server 5.6. The timeline for implementation of Transaction
Server 5.6 is 2Q 2022 through 3Q 2023. 4 CICS regions were upgraded to CICS
Transaction Server 5.6 as part of ALPHA testing.
Where to find additional information
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A more in depth description of capabilities introduced by Transaction
Server 5.5 and 5.6 may be obtained from the following IBM documents:
CICS TS for z/OS V5.5 (this version is being bypassed)
What's New:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/5.5?topic=whats-new
CICS TS for z/OS V5.6
What's New:
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/5.6?topic=whats-new
Link to find manuals for all supported releases of CICS:
CICS Manuals (IBM has renamed several manuals including application support manuals):
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/5.6
Primary Contact – USA, Brazil, Canada(AVIVA and Stelco):
Mathuri Babu - +91 9704765680
Secondary Contact - USA and Brazil:
Carlos Nascimento - +55 11 31813175
Primary Contact - Canada:
Paul Haney - 416-471-2416
Secondary Contact - Canada:
Larry McCulley - 416-988-0669
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Usercomm - CICS TS R5.6 Upgrade Information 