Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

As people may be aware, JES/328X was removed from marketing earlier this week. It also goes out of service in November of NEXT year. and the web page says .. replacement product - none. We still have several accounts that run JES/328X, and, although most of the definitions are 'dead' there is regular activity. I know the SO stance is to replace it with Infoprint, VPS, CA-Spool etc. We also have one customer that uses LPDSERV .. but what, really, should we be advising the customer(s) to use? I would assume some part of z/OS that's already there.
As an example one customer has only about 4 active printers that go out to TCPIP emulated printer sessions.

For the customers that are already using it You have more than 1 year before the NEW maintenance stops
so I guess that You/Your customers still have some time to make a decision
another point to look at would be the frequency of past maintenance
IIRC once upon a time it was a pretty stable product
and it might be safe to keep using it , even after maintenance stops, at least for dumb printers

I would make the current customers aware of the alternatives and let them decide

for <new> customers who have the need for remote printing,
all depends on the amount of printing to be done and the the device that will be used

Thanks Enrico, That's the sort of general advice we were already given, however, we are not print experts, and so if we were to present the options to the customer, they'd probably want details, such as cost, which we're not supposed to talk about, or effort required, which we're not supposed to give them, or functional differences, which we don't have the background to describe.. especially as some print products are supported by the z/OS team, and some by our AT&T host network team... and even those we've mostly inherited with the accounts, and don't know in depth. There should be an expert print group.. somewhere..

I think I posted this in another forum, but my PC crashed. The customer in question is migrating from z/OS 2.1 (where JES/328X runs fine) to 2.2 so I was looking for compatibility info, but I could not find it. The latest think I could find was an announcement letter Last revised on January 12, 1999. Anyone have a web page that shows this?

Hi markjf,

Yes, I agree with you there is not much documentation - been searching it for some time now, since your initial post here. On the other hand, here is a mention about JES/328X under zOS 2.2, have a look please but they don't really talk about compatibility here:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgece ... _phase.htm

That article obviously infers that JES/328X is compatible with zOS 2.2 otherwise why mention that it can be used for various scenarios?

Precisely the point but it does not really talk about "compatibility info", so was bit hesitant...

as far as I can remember JES328 does not depend on any jes control blocks - it's just a VTAM application -
so if it works under zOS 2.1 I do not see any reasons for it not to work with zOS 2.2 .