University of Florida teaches exceptional value of IBM CICS Transaction Server, Version 4, on the mainframe.

Overview

Challenge
Develop administrative framework for packaged student health education program

Solution
Administrative support for health education program mandated by university to reduce student problem behavior

Key Benefits
Lower total cost of ownership than any other implementation on campus; subsecond responses on Web; ability to complete implementation in under 6 weeks, a fraction of the time required by other platforms; seamless integration with existing, locally written CICS Web-based UF Student Records System, known as ISIS, or Integrated Student Information System

“With CICS TS, Version 3, running on our IBM System z9 Business Class mainframe, we were well-positioned to act quickly and we finished the project in less than six weeks. We’re very pleased with CICS TS, Version 3. It made our project a success.”
–Steve Ware, Systems Coordinator, Computing & Networking Services,
University of Florida

“The CICS Web Services Assistant supports rapid deployment of CICS TS applications to provide and request services. The streamlined process requires a minimum of effort.”
–Steve Ware

“Our total cost of ownership is very low compared to other solutions. Our administrative framework for health education is far superior in terms of cost compared to any other implementation I’ve seen on campus.”
–Steve Ware

Why IBM?
IBM showed that IBM CICS® Transaction Server and the mainframe combine to form a modern, robust platform that makes application programming easier

Like other institutions of higher learning, the University of Florida (UF) is concerned with more than just academic excellence. It also has to deal with self-destructive student behaviors associated with alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, stress and eating disorders. The University of Florida is one of a group of educational institutions that are striving to combat such problems by requiring students to take Web-based health education programs developed with the support of the National Institutes of Health.

The University of Florida in Gainesville is the state’s largest and most comprehensive university, and among the nation’s most academically diverse public universities with 50,000 students. Appointed president of UF in 2003, J. Bernard Machen has made it part of his agenda to promote student health education. In 2006, he announced that new and transferring students would be required to take one of five health education programs before registering for regular academic courses.

myStudentBody.com, based in Newton, Massachusetts, provides this training in convenient course modules accessible through the Web. It was left to the university’s Computing & Networking Services department, a centralized data center, to configure and support the CICS TS Web Services component by providing a platform on which the university registrar’s office could develop an administrative framework for the myStudentBody.com program. The registrar’s office needed to know whether students had completed the requirement and could enroll in their courses.

In addition, the new applications had to be integrated with the university’s existing student record system which was based on IBM CICS Transaction Server, Version 3. Version 3 is Web services-enabled, allowing developers to loosely couple requests for services from Web-based applications without coding point-to-point integration between applications.

“We had very little time to act,” says Steve Ware, systems coordinator, University of Florida Computing & Networking Services. “The student requirement for health education began with the spring semester. We had a two-month window in which to develop the framework. With CICS TS, Version 3, running on our IBM System z9 Business Class mainframe, we were well-positioned to act quickly and we finished the project in less than six weeks. IBM delivered easy-to-use tools for building Web services with Version 3 of CICS TS, and we took advantage of them in a timely manner. We’re very pleased with CICS TS, Version 3. It made our project a success.”

Efficiently extending existing system
A student who has not taken the health education assessment is prevented from registering for a future term. When the student completes one of the five health education modules, the myStudentBody.com databases are updated. Over a secure HTTPS connection, this information is retrieved in two ways. Large amounts of data are retrieved via a regularly scheduled batch process that executes a CICS-TS transaction. Alternatively, single-record requests are retrieved interactively. Most of the updates processed by the student records system are accomplished via a batch process, which can exceed 100,000 records

When a student is prevented from registering, the student can go to myStudentBody.com, complete the assessment and immediately return and register. This is possible because the student records system issues a Web services request for that student’s status, a process that is completely transparent to the student. If the student has completed the assessment, the restriction is lifted and the student is able to register.

Appropriate administrators at UF can monitor each student’s status. They are also provided daily counts that summarize the overall progress of the targeted population’s completion of the requirement. Thousands of students and staff use a suite of hundreds of integrated CICS-TS Web applications that maintain the VSAM and DB2 for z/OS, Version 7, student records system. Very few users are aware of the technology that drives the system; all they care about are the sub-second response times, even when processing more than a million transactions a day.

By using the containers and channels feature of CICS TS V3, developers can enable CICS programs to exchange unlimited data with virtually any Web-based program, avoiding the 32-kilobyte constraint of the CICS communication area (COMMAREA). The containers and channels feature promotes easy linkage between the university’s time-proven core business processes and the new business models created to extend the legacy student course system.

“CICS TS, Version 3, has proven itself to be a fast, highly reliable and very modern transaction processing environment,” says Ware.

Building Web services with ease
MyStudentBody.com provided UF with Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) descriptors of their Web services, an industry-standard protocol. UF used the CICS Web Services Assistant to transform existing CICS TS applications into Web services and enable CICS TS applications to use the Web services provided by myStudentBody.com. “The CICS Web Services Assistant supports rapid deployment of CICS TS applications to provide and request services,” says Ware. “The streamlined process requires a minimum of effort.” Another CICS TS feature that facilitates an efficient development process is the CICS TS Information Center, which is based on Eclipse, an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software. The CICS TS, Version 3, Information Center is made up of document plug-ins that contain product information for CICS TS and its related tools. “The CICS TS Information Center provides us with the easily searchable information we need to do our jobs,” says Ware. “It’s great that it has an open standards Eclipse base. I already had Eclipse on my workstations and I could easily plug in the documentation.” Ware runs Slackware Linux on all the group’s workstations, desktops, laptops and on its Information Center server.

Subsecond response time and mainframe reliability
UF recently took delivery of an IBM System z9 Business Class server, replacing its IBM System z 800 mainframe. The university also purchased an IBM System Storage DS8100 to replace IBM Enterprise Storage Server®.

“With the new mainframe, we’re getting better performance,” says Ware. Approximately 98 percent of the time we deliver subsecond response rates. With the DS8100, we’re getting 10 times the throughput.”

To ensure that performance and availability remain high, UF has purchased IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for CICS on z/OS, Version 4, which gives the university the ability to monitor and manage CICS TS transactions and resources so that, when a problem occurs, it can be quickly detected and isolated to minimize or eliminate the impact.

“Not only is our IBM infrastructure rock solid,” Ware adds, “Our total cost of ownership is very low compared to other solutions. Our administrative framework for health education is far superior in terms of cost compared to any other implementation I’ve seen on campus. It took us a fraction of the time to develop than it would have on any other platform, and it’s providing us with a reliable, fast solution for moving our health education program forward into the future.”

Key Component
Software
IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS®, Version 3
IBM DB2® for z/OS, Version 7.1
IBM Tivoli® OMEGAMON® XE for z/OS
Servers
IBM System z9™ Business Class
IBM System Storage™ DS8100

For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.

Visit our Web site at:
ibm.com/software/htp/cics

For more information on the University of Florida, visit:
www.ufl.edu