3. Maintenance Policies and Procedures › 3.1 Product Maintenance Policies

3.1 Product Maintenance Policies

CA MICS is regularly maintained to provide the most quality,
utility and performance to our customers, and to keep up with
a constantly advancing technological base.  The CA MICS
Product Support Program exists for the purpose of
distributing maintenance in the most efficient and
understandable way, with appropriate failsafe and fallback
mechanisms.

Because of the evolving nature of the CA MICS product and its
maintenance subsystems, there can never be a complete list of
maintenance procedures.  Procedures are added, changed, or
dropped, as necessary, to keep CA MICS positioned as the most
comprehensive I/S management product in the industry.
However, we present this list of Product Maintenance Policies
here for your consideration as the foundation of CA MICS
maintenance policy, not as a complete list.  Any user
feedback on these policies will be greatly appreciated.

The following policies govern CA MICS maintenance and user
modifications:

o  Product Changes delivered through the Product Support
   Program (PSP) should be reviewed and, if applicable, be
   applied by the user within 120 days of receipt.

o  All user written changes to CA MICS modules should be
   applied through the IEBUPDTE utility.

o  A CA MICS module should NEVER be modified directly through
   an online editor such as EDIT, SPF EDIT, or the QED
   EDITOR.  An attempt to edit a CA MICS source module will
   result in forcing the EDITOR into NONUM mode.  The
   module's sequence numbers must be MANUALLY ENTERED in this
   mode.  This is done in order to avoid the accidental
   renumbering of the source module, and is accomplished by
   setting the sequence number field of the first statement
   (columns 73 through 80) to 'MICS6'.

o  All changes to CA MICS modules are to be noted in the
   Change Logs at the front of each module.  Separate areas
   are allocated for standard CA MICS maintenance (i.e.,
   supplied by CA) and user modifications.  Each change to
   the module is noted by one comment line.  Modifications
   distributed via component upgrades, releases, and the
   CA MICS Product Support Program automatically update the
   Change Logs.

o  Standard CA MICS maintenance should be applied via PSP
   Online.

   If necessary, full module replacements will be supplied.
   The resequencing of module numbers will be avoided
   wherever possible.

o  Standard CA MICS maintenance is distributed for the
   following libraries, and in most cases, will NOT be
   applied to the library automatically.  This is to
   safeguard user modifications that have been made to
   CA MICS.

      CA MICS.USER.SOURCE
      CA MICS.PARMS

o  Integration of CA MICS maintenance with user modifications
   (i.e., retrofitting) is the responsibility of user.

The CA MICS design provides the user with a high degree of
flexibility in tailoring a system through its standard
options, its generation processes, and the provision to
enable user modification of system code.  If this latter
provision is used prudently and with good change control
practices, the results will be advantageous to all.