Hi. Sounds like you need Tubes from Macro 4. With Tubes you can define a TCP/IP session to the Telnet on the other LPAR. From the Telnet session connection you can either go directly to the application, such as TSO, or even to another Tubes system and have access to all the applications on that LPAR. You can connect multiple Tubes systems in this manner and access all of your applications across all of your LPARs. On the secondary subject of why you might need a Session Manager - our customers are super keen on security, compliance & auditing and accessibility. For security they want to control what applications a user can see and therefore access and they like this control to be in the hands of the RACF security team. For compliance & auditing they need to ensure that users can only access certain data and this access is fully audited. Compliance is a hot topic, especially with the new European GDPR rules coming along in May which will affect all European business and also any world-wide businesses that access any personal data belonging to a European. Along with this I also predict that logging on to the mainframe will require Multi-Factor Authentication to satisfy the GDPR auditors. So if you use just a terminal emulator and open up individual connections then you will have to enter your MFA credentials each time for every emulator connection. Every time those emulator connections drops (how many times do you reboot your PC for Windows updates for example, or shut-down each night, etc.) you will have to re-enter your MFA credentials for each and every connection. Much better to just log on once to a session manager and enter your MFA credentials just once and if you lose connection due to a reboot you just log on once again and all your applications are just where you left them. There are also hidden costs to having emulation software, apart from administrating licenses there is also installation and upgrades plus help desk support to consider. One of our customers is desperate to get rid of their emulation software as most of their thousands of end-users are not IT staff and they spend tens of thousands of dollars each year just in Help Desk support costs. A modern session manager will also have web access capabilities giving the end-user even more flexibility, as well as the potential to reduce their emulation usage and costs. When wondering around the office I use my tablet and when I want to access my mainframe sessions I just use the web browser on the tablet to log in and all my mainframe sessions are exactly as I left them when I got up from my desk. Modern Session Managers have moved on from just simple 3270 access. So just like the death of the mainframe, the death of Session Managers is a long way off.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
