Re: How many sites still on V1.5 or earlier?

From: "Craddock, Chris" <Chris.Craddock@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Chris (Blaicher) is looking at the question from the ISV point of view.
While all of the comments made on both sides of the question are
correct, what is not said - at least not here - is that very often we
see customers who are very back-level on OS and middleware maintenance
and who still want to get the latest and greatest functionality from
their ISV software. That is a recipe for misery on both sides, but it
never stops people from asking for it.

I agree it can be a pain, but there are ways the pain can be mitigated. For example, things can be coded so that if a certain level of the operating system is required, the program knows which operating system it's running under and can enable or disable features accordingly. To give a practical example, the product I'm responsible for will run on z/OS 1.8 and take full advantage of z/OS 1.8 features. The exact same version of the product can be installed on a really old system (e.g. OS/390 2.10), and there are no problems or conflicts whatsoever.

The nice thing about having a single product version for all versions of the operating system is that as customers upgrade their older systems, new features become available 'automatically' without the customer having to install newer versions of the product.

If a customer on an older system tries to do something they can't do, they might see a message along the lines of "This feature requires z/OS version 1.x". But to me, this is no different than a customer wanting to take advantage of new features in DB2 (or whatever); they obviously have to install the new version of DB2 before they can use the new features.

Dave Salt
SimpList(tm) - The easiest, most powerful way to surf a mainframe!
http://www.mackinney.com/products/SIM/simplist.htm

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