Written by Domenico D’Alterio, an Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, leader in the Zowe technical community and a Principal Product Manager, IBM Z
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join the CMG Impact 2023 conference, located in Atlanta, Georga, on February 21-23, to give an update about Open Mainframe Project’s ZoweTM titled, “Zowe (R)evolution with V2 and beyond.”
It was a great experience – I’m so happy that we are back in person conferences! But for those who couldn’t attend in person, the session was available for live streaming.
The audience for the session was a mix of newcomers and experienced Zowe users, which continues to grow the more we give talks like this at industry conferences.
My presentation featured the different core components available as part of the framework seeing the value of them for different users, starting from the system programmers that can rely on REST API, to the devOps engineers that most likely will leverage the CLI interface, to the application developers that will be able to leverage the VC Code extension for owe to code in a familiar development environment, to finish with the operators and administrators that can leverage the Zowe desktop. There isn’t an interface that fits for all, which one of the reason of the success of Zowe is exactly in the variety of interfaces that it offers to interact and manage z/OS resources from the interface that best fit the specific user need.
More experienced Zowe users attending the session provided positive feedback about the advantages of using Zowe interfaces in different scenarios and the enhancements delivered in Zowe V2. These enhancements were based on the users feedback received in the previous 2 years. Simplification in the deployment and configuration is one of the strengths in Zowe V2, which makes this version of Zowe even more enterprise ready.
Finally, the entire audience expressed a lot of interest in the overview for well Zowe Chat, one of Zowe’s incubation projects.
The Chat tool in most user work environments are used for human-to-human interaction on top of email and phone call. With the introduction of chatbot, the interaction between human-machine is gaining interest and users across the board.
I briefly presented the features available in the technical preview of Zowe Chat. You can read this blog for more details. This part generated interested in the audience and I took a question about the NLS (Natural Language Support), which is a frequent question/requirement. Though not available yet, it is in Zowe Chat near term roadmap.
Bottom line, this was a great experience and, as an Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, I would love to continue to present Zowe to audiences and engage with real users of this framework.
Learn more about Zowe in the community-led blog series here. Or, ask a question and join the conversation on the Open Mainframe Project Slack Channel #zowe-client-sdk, #zowe-cli, #zowe-dev, #zowe-user, or #zowe-onboarding. If this is your first time using the Open Mainframe Slack Channel register here.
