I am excited to be part of todays announcement of z/OS 2.5, the next release of z/OS. This release contains a number of new capabilities and a sweeping up of many continuous delivery items that clients should appreciate.

I have been directly involved in selecting content for z/OS for the last 13 years. This is the 8th major z/OS release that I have worked on recently. Some of you may know that I worked on MVS, MVS/ESA, and OS/390 before I ventured out to work in WebSphere.

This release of z/OS includes hardware support, resiliency improvements, security improvements, system management improvements, performance improvements, application improvements and simplification improvements. The chart deck that I present on this is located here. https://github.com/IBM/IBM-Z-zOS/tree/main/zOS-Education/zOS-V2.5-Education

I had to pre-record my SHARE version of this deck for Thursday’s presentation and I pre-recorded another version for Thursday outside of SHARE.

A couple of highlights I will point out in V2.5. The Server Pac will now come in z/OSMF Portable Software Instance Format which will bring a browser based experience to installation and configuration of z/OS. This is complemented by our software management component which brings a browser based experience to installation of service. With these two changes we have really moved the bar in the capability of the browser UI. While it likely won’t convince diehard ISPF users… it should tip the scale for some of the new tenure clients to major in the browser UI.

Both the upgrade workflows and the ICSF component will now ship as z/OS parts and be serviced using typical service tooling rather than being downloaded from GIT (in the case of the workflows) or from a web server in the case of ICSF. These kinds of changes reduce the variation in delivery model which should result in a more consistent experience.

z/OSMF has moved to the desktop view only. This is a better user interface, providing more screen area for applications, the opportunity for multi-tasking is now present. This means you can have two or more windows active at the same time. For newer tenure system programmers they find the desktop more intuitive. From my perspective it is no different than a KDE desktop in Linux or the Windows desktop or the MacOS desktop. Now we have a z/OS desktop. Clearly we will have a different approach as z/OS is not a personal operating system. But you can have folders, objects in folders etc. Some of the objects can be datasets, unix directories and files, PDS(e) members and you can create/delete, browse/edit, rename, copy etc. These objects are really ‘alias’s or virtual links to the real objects. We also support Jobs this way as well. You can submit, status, get output etc.

Let me stop here and talk about some other new capabilities in my next post.