UPDATE: TPF Customer Satisfaction Plan

In the last issue of ACP/TPF Today, we (IBM TPF Development) reported that our efforts in addressing the TPFUG requirement for SMP/E had been put on hold. Since then, we have been working through your IBM account teams to validate this requirement, and have been continuing to analyze our survey results from the last TPFUG meeting.

Your feedback told us that you would rather have us put our resources on other projects. Some TPF customers did respond in favor of SMP/E, however this reflected only a small portion of the total TPF community. What we have heard from most of you, is that the resource that would be required for us to ship SMP/E format (in addition to MVS and CMS formats) would be better spent on other projects such as 10X improvements in quality, and incorporation of more customer modifications.

Therefore, we will continue to apply our resources to your higher priorities, and have no plans to continue with the SMP/E effort. Please note that this does not affect the SMP/E format code currently shipped for the TPFDF and ALCS product lines. We will continue to provide SMP/E formatted code for these products.

We are continuing to investigate alternative solutions to the problems TPF users face in maintaining source code. As examples, we are looking into the value provided by the documentation of prerequisite APARs, and we have recently begun shipping a "Migration Notebook" with each PTF tape, which provides migration information for key APARs on the tape.

Your input as to additional ways to alleviate TPF maintainability problems is welcomed. Please forward ideas to TPF Systems Customer Service through your IBM account team, or send them to:

Heather Kahan or Bill Supon
TPF Systems Customer Service
IBM Corporation
40 Apple Ridge Road
Danbury, CT 06810
or to ID USIB2S7M at IBMMAIL