main content

SupportConnect - Advantage VISION Newsletter, Version 03.03

NOTE: E-News technical information is dynamic and links in archived copies of these technical newsletters may eventually become invalid as the products evolve. Please check the support web page for your product to get the latest technical information.

Advantage™ VISION Newsletter
Version 03.03
October 01, 2003

In This Newsletter

Product Updates

Product Offerings
> Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition for Advantage™ VISION:Inform® 1.5
> Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition for Advantage™ VISION:Inquiry® 1.5
> Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition for Advantage™ VISION:Results® 1.5
> Advantage™ VISION:Inquiry® for IMS 6.5 and Advantage™ VISION:Inquiry® for CICS 6.5
> Advantage™ VISION:Inform® for IMS 4.0 and Advantage™ VISION:Inform® for CICS 4.0
> Advantage™ Automated Code Manager 1.5 SP01

General Information

	>	Advantage™ Code Structuring for COBOL - Automate the Migration of Your COBOL Programs
	>	Using Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition to Access Virtually Any Data on the Mainframe
	>	Using Advantage™ VISION Products to Support Your Data Warehouse Projects
	>	Data Sampling Using Advantage™ VISION:Excel
	>	ca smart™ Certified Solutions

Product Offerings
We are excited to announce our new Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition product offerings:

The Advantage Intraccess Web Edition family of products enables business users to quickly and easily access vital corporate z/OS mainframe data using the power and convenience of intranet technology and connectivity. The product family includes:

Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition for Advantage™ VISION:Inform® 1.5
Advantage Intraccess Web Edition for VISION:Inform allows users to execute predefined Advantage VISION:Inform queries and view the results from their web browsers. Data from disparate data sources, such as DB2, Advantage CA-IDMS Database, Advantage CA-Datacom Database, IMS, VSAM, and flat files are integrated into a single, relational view on an as-needed basis, supporting business processes.

For more information on Advantage Intraccess Web Edition for VISION:Inform, click here.

Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition for Advantage™ VISION:Inquiry® 1.5
Advantage Intraccess Web Edition for VISION:Inquiry allows users to view a detailed list of their predefined queries on the mainframe, select individual queries, examine their properties, and run them - all from within their web browsers. Users can monitor the status of running queries and catalog the results of the queries.

For more information on Advantage Intraccess Web Edition for VISION:Inquiry, click here.

Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition for Advantage™ VISION:Results® 1.5
Advantage Intraccess Web Edition for VISION:Results supports management and submission of Advantage VISION:Results batch jobs from a web browser. Runtime parameters provide execution time-unique selections. The resulting output of the mainframe jobs can then be downloaded and/or published to the portal.

For more information on Advantage Intraccess Web Edition for VISION:Results, click here.

This has been another very active quarter for Advantage™ VISION products. We've made five new major product releases Generally Available (GA).

Advantage™ VISION:Inquiry® for IMS 6.5 and
Advantage™ VISION:Inquiry® for CICS 6.5
The Advantage VISION:Inquiry development team is pleased to announce that version 6.5 is now GA. Advantage VISION:Inquiry is an online, command-driven, interactive information retrieval and immediate response reporting system. Advantage VISION:Inquiry provides concurrent and transparent access to information stored in DB2, IMS/DB, and VSAM (KSDS, RRDS, and ESDS) data structures.

For more information on release 6.5 of Advantage VISION:Inquiry for IMS, click here.

For more information on release 6.5 of Advantage VISION:Inquiry for CICS, click here.

Support for prior releases of Advantage VISION:Inquiry will continue through
December 2004.

Advantage™ VISION:Inform® for IMS 4.0 and
Advantage™ VISION:Inform® for CICS 4.0
The Advantage VISION:Inform development team is proud to announce that version 4.0 is now GA. Advantage VISION:Inform is software used for reporting via a 3270 component and for data extraction from the enterprise server database to the PC user. Advantage VISION:Inform selects data from enterprise server databases, controlling security through the use of password validation and user profiles.

For more information on release 4.0 of Advantage VISION:Inform, click here.

Support for prior releases of Advantage VISION:Inform will continue through
December 2004.

Advantage Automated Code Manager 1.5 SP01
We are pleased to announce that release 1.5 SP01 of Advantage Automated Code Manager is now GA. For existing COBOL applications, Advantage Automated Code Manager helps you assess the code quality, prepare documentation, and automatically restructure code via an easy-to-use Windows interface.

For more information on Advantage Automated Code Manager, click here.

Customers current on maintenance for the above products should have already received an order form in the mail. If you have not received this or have not already placed an order for product shipment for any of the above, please contact the order desk at 1-800-637-5858.

For customers outside North America, please contact your local CA Support office.

Top

Advantage™ Automated Code Structuring for COBOL - Automate the Migration of
Your COBOL Programs
Migrating a COBOL program to a different platform/environment requires that you clearly and easily separate the business logic code from the data logic code. The typical candidate COBOL program is a large program that has been modified many times by many COBOL programmers and contains a significant amount of "spaghetti" code. Advantage Automated Code Structuring for COBOL, one of the Advantage Code Quality Tools for COBOL, will help you automate and streamline the difficult and time-consuming migration task.

For each COBOL program, Code Structuring will:

Restructure the program control flow and produce a 100% structured program
Eliminate the spaghetti code
Retain the full and original program functionality
Explicitly isolate all the data logic code at the end of the structured code
(Batch I/O, CICS, SQL, DL/I statements)
Implicitly isolate all the business logic code
Remove all the dead code
Document all the Control Flow changes
Produce a program Structure Chart
Apply programming standards

For more information, click here.

Top

Using Advantage™ Intraccess™ Web Edition to Access Virtually Any Data
on the Mainframe
A significant number of enterprises house their mission-critical legacy data on mainframes. Every enterprise in the world is faced with the same challenge of how to leverage their valuable legacy data to make intelligent business decisions. With Advantage Intraccess, a member of the Advantage™ VISION product family, Computer Associates delivers a new capability to extend the value of mainframe data investments. Advantage Intraccess provides z/OS reporting directly from a browser-based interface and can publish information to a portal, IBM WebSphere, and to the Web.

This article demonstrates how easily users, with little or no knowledge of mainframe technology, can access their corporate information regardless of where and how it is stored.

For more information, click here.

Top

Using Advantage™ VISION Products to Support Your Data Warehouse Projects
The term "data warehouse" has been around for many years and, although the technology used to support data warehouse activities has grown during that time, the basic concept of data warehousing has remained, mostly, the same since the term was coined and made popular in the 1980's. The desire to consolidate and put to use information that was stored on many types of media, in many locations, and on many platforms, was a necessity for companies, regardless of size, to survive in the information age. To do this, the Information Technologist was given a monumental task of building and maintaining applications to support this requirement.

The Advantage VISION family of software products can do just that. They were built and continually enhanced to manage large volumes of data and provide flexibility to perform data extraction, filtering, cleansing, and loading of your mainframe data with ease.

To learn more about what Advantage™ VISION:Results®, Advantage™ VISION:Builder®, and Advantage™ VISION:Report® can do to help build and manage your data warehouse, click here.

Top

Data Sampling Using Advantage™ VISION:Excel
Sampling has always been a method for reducing effort and getting a job done in a reasonable amount of time while still providing an acceptable level of accuracy. For instance, programmers use sample files to test their programs; the time and effort is greatly reduced in checking that their programs actually generate the correct results. Auditors use sampling as a means of reducing the effort of checking recorded values against actual values and, yet, produce meaningful determinations and critiques.

Advantage VISION:Excel simplifies the sampling of a database. It includes sampling techniques for an array of purposes, from as simple as creating a test database to selecting a sample for an auditor's professional and critical review. Advantage VISION:Excel has robust sampling functionality, with eleven Sampling Techniques, grouped as follows:

Non-Statistical Sampling Techniques
- Simple Interval Sampling
- Simple Random Sampling
- Stratified Simple Percentage Sampling
- Stratified Simple Random Sampling
Statistical Sampling Techniques
- Acceptance Sampling
- Attribute Estimation Sampling
- Discovery Sampling
- Dollar Unit
- Estimation Sampling of Values
- Proportional Sampling
- Stratified Mean Estimation Sampling

Using the sampling functionality is easy.

With so many sampling techniques, the question is when to use any given sampling technique? The answer lies in having somewhat of an understanding of the purpose of these techniques and how they work.

Click here to learn how easily sample files can be created using Advantage VISION:Excel.

Click here to learn about Advantage VISION:Excel's Non-Statistical Sampling Techniques.

Click here to learn about Advantage VISION:Excel's Statistical Sampling Techniques.

Top

ca smart™ Certified Solutions
ca smart Certified Solutions represent the highest quality and innovation built on CA's industry-leading technologies. Based on close collaboration between CA and its partners, solutions receiving the ca smart™ seal of excellence deliver the highest level of quality and create the greatest value for customers to successfully compete in the new economy. In short, ca smart is another great way in which we're delivering value to our partners and customers.

For more information on a ca smart solution, visit our virtual solution center.

Recent ca smart certified solutions:

Top

You are subscribed as &*TO;.

To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change the format for this or other newsletters, please go to our E-News subscription page. You can also unsubscribe by sending an email to: editor_enews@ca.com with "Unsubscribe enews_vision" (without the quotes) in the message body. You must include the exact email address that you wish to unsubscribe.
Feedback? Comments? Suggestions?
Send an email to: editor_enews@ca.com. All submissions become the property of the publisher and may or may not be reprinted.
NOTE: This address should be used only for feedback on this newsletter. Requests for technical support should be submitted through normal channels.

main content

Page Tools