John, here I have to disagree with you. I don't tweet, and do not see any useful function that Twitter provides over email. Email is not necessarily wordy, and I have not observed it being "slow to deliver" as in, hours or days late --- minutes are fine as far as I am concerned. If I want instantaneous information I'll be logged on and actively looking.
People are not really built to "monitor constantly" because our attention spans can be quite small. Email has the advantage of (at least in my MUA) politely and discretely announcing arriving messages which I can then ignore if pressed for time or deal with immediately as I see fit. I really do try not to be a luddite about new technologies, but I do have to draw my personal line at using the Twitter model as a business tool. Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 8:33 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Automatic Job Ended Email (detail information) On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 12:57 AM, Brian Westerman < brian_wester...@syzygyinc.com> wrote: > Hi, > > We are testing our SyzMail product that provides for the sending of email > when a task (JOB STC or TSO user) ends that contains all of the normal > stuff you would expect to see (maxCC, stepCCs, programs used, etc.) and I > was thinking that it would be great to provide the execution time (both > wall clock and CPU) that the task used and the start and end times and some > other information that is all just right there for the picking, but it has > started some controversy here because many (most actually) think that > people could care less about the details and mostly just care about the > condition codes. I myself think that since the email is being generated > and we have the information available, that it makes sense to send it. My > thinking is that if you can see at a "glance" that the job ran a particular > way that you might be more likely to save time by not having to find the > job output and view it. In fact, I was thinking that sometimes seeing how > much time a job used, wall and CPU, can be almost as important as the > condition codes. > > I agree that providing information that no one will ever want is a waste, > and have considered providing the option for a normal and "verbose" type of > email, but I keep thinking that once the job is done and the email is > dynamically generated, it's not like the user can come back and say, that > they have a CC=4 in step07 so they would like to have some additional > information, it's just too late by then. > > I figured that asking normal people (which some of you are), might be a > reasonable thing to do. > > Any comments or suggestions? > Not a direct response to your question, but something that has been running around in my mind lately (lots of room there). Why email? What has been percolating in my head is setting up a private company Twitter-like server. The Twitter server code is not available, but the client code is. So write some server code which responses to the client requests like Twitter does. I haven't really found any yet, but there may be some Open Source "microblogging" software already which does. this. Now, as to why do this? Email tends to be wordy and slow to deliver. And, in my opinion, is difficult to read on a small device such as a smart phone. Tweets are short and generally delivered much faster. Also, there are Twitter client apps available for almost anything: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. So using a compatible microblogging server would leverage the existing client software. Also, if this server is written properly, all of the company's servers (z/OS, Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac, ...) could route tweets via it. The end user would need some sort of login credential to the microblogging server, but could then "subscribe" to the events that they were interested in. Each company server would be a user which could be followed. In the case of z/OS, there might be multiple users for a system. For example, suppose I have a z/OS with the SYSNAME of MANNY. I run a number of things on MANNY: CA-7, CICS (multiple regions), DB2. I would then have multiple twitter users for MANNY, such as manny.zos (z/OS system status messages), manny.ca7 (for CA-7 messages), manny.cicsreg1, manny.cicsreg2, manny,<other cics region names>, and manny.db2 . The user could then follow one or more of these to receive tweets about these processes. And, of course, there are users for each of the other z/OS system names. For your product, you might want the user name of manny.jobstatus . Of course, since this microblogging server would likely exist on a non-z platform (but maybe z/Linux?), I can envision the keeper of that domain "pushing back" on this sort of thing. Or maybe other shops are no longer still in the "us vs. them" battles that we still fight when we want something from the "distributed" (aka LAN) people. > > Brian > > -- Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of everything and the Wirth of nothing? Maranatha! <>< John McKown -- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. 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