It seems every 3 - 4 year we go through the process of needing reinstall Natural so we are on a current release. We are currently on 8.2.3 of Natural. I see 8.2.6 is now available.
We run
Natural
Natural/CICS
Natural/DB2
It always seems like a battle to get these products installed and customized. Are there any shortcut cuts are tools available to help with the install, or is it still the same way of continually reassembling the various parameter related programs and re-linkedit’ing things until it works?
Thanks,
There is no way around tailoring the parms and reassembling things.
Software AG provides SMA (System Maintenance Aid) to assist you here, you just define the parameters and SMA will generate the relevant jobs for you, based on what has changed, rather than you having to hop through all product JCL libs and find the ones you need to tweak and run.
I’ve looked into SMA and in spite of having performed a number of upgrades over the years, I’ve never been able to figure out how it’s organized enough to know what to plug into it. On the other hand, I know some who have sworn by SMA as a way to keep track of multiple different installations (Andy Engels is a big proponent of SMA).
The thing that has helped me is to document any given upgrade instructions as provided in the manual and detail out what customizations we need to do as part of that. We can revisit it each time we upgrade. I know there is a chance the next upgrade’s instructions could vary but at least we have a record of such customizations and will repeat them anyway.