Welcome to RSMUpdate

RSM TutorLine - you are not on your own

REXX - a fast and powerful tool in the data centre

Puzzled by all the Acronyms & Abbreviations?

You've attended an RSM course - but you meant to ask...

You can be quite sure that, in the days and weeks (and sometimes months) after you complete a course, you will think of some questions that you wished you'd asked the instructor at the time. It happens to us all.

To answer this need, RSM has introduced the RSM TutorLine service. On completion of an RSM course all attendees get free access to RSM's new TutorLine service.

TutorLine provides you with post-course advice and guidance on any of the topics and subjects covered by the RSM course (or courses) that you have attended. Access can be through the RSM Portal, using your unique id and password, or by telephone or by email to:

tutorline@rsm-online.com

Whichever method you use, your question will be channelled through to the instructor who taught the course or (if they are unavailable) another instructor or consultant with the same high level of expertise.

FAQs

• I attended a course several years ago - what's the time limit on this service?
  
  There's no time limit - if you've attended an RSM course (since the first one we ran, back in 1979) you can access the service!
  
  
• Is there a cost?
  
  No - this a completely free service!
  
  
• How quickly can you turn questions around?
  
  While it's not an emergency hotline, we promise to get back to you within 48 hours of receiving your questions.
  

REXX (Restructured Extended Executor), developed by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM, was launched by IBM back in 1981 and is still one of the most useful and powerful tools available in the modern data centre.

Primarily used as a macro language for processing data and text and generating reports, REXX, due to such features as its simple syntax, small instruction set and rich selection of built-in functions, is a favourite tool for many Systems Programmers, Operations Analysts and Application Programmers. REXX provides many of the capabilities of traditional programming languages (such as COBOL or PL/I), without the overhead of program compilation, link-editing and so on.

One of RSM's most popular courses is Using REXX under TSO/ISPF, an intensive 3-day introduction to REXX, which provides attendees with a clear and solid understanding of how to use and exploit the benefits of REXX.

For those of you working in a DB2 for z/OS environment, RSM now offers the follow-on course DB2 for z/OS: Using REXX.

Both these courses are regularly scheduled for public presentation and are also available for one-company, on-site presentations. The next public dates this year for these courses are:

As if the IT world wasn't complicated enough - over the years we've managed to populate it with thousands of acronyms and abbreviations that can be a puzzle both for newcomers and for those of us who've been around since IBM launched OS/360 in 1964.

To help, RSM is putting together a series of Acronym & Abbreviation lists that will be made available for free download.

The first two of these are:

• A list of the commonly found acronyms & abbreviations encountered regularly by those of us working in z Systems environments.
• A list of the commonly found acronyms & abbreviations encountered by those of us working in the CICS Transaction Server environment.

To download the free PDFs, just click below for the one you want!

RSM downloads

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Until the next issue we wish you all a trouble free month ahead!

Kind Regards

The RSMUpdate team