HP 3000 datacenter managers can tap a new resource this month as JobAlert/3000 makes its debut for MPE/iX systems. The software, distributed by Team 3000 (www.team3000.com, 800.733.3490), was developed by RAC Consulting’s Rich Corn (www.racc.com, 360.357.9572) to get another option for job and spoolfile management with expanded paging capabilities into the e3000 market.

JobAlert stakes out some of the same ground as the widely installed JobRescue product from Nobix, but goes beyond its competition to offer e-mail notification in addition to paging when jobs fail and integrated spoolfile and report distribution. The product sends alphanumeric pages via modem and e-mail, as well as standard e-mail messages, all hosted directly on the HP 3000 with no other platform required.

Management of job errors is a major task in the 200-plus credit unions using HP e3000s, Corn said. Summit Information Systems’ Spectrum users make up the most prominent base of batch job management tool sites.

Error messages that flag job failures crop up in the 3000’s $STDLIST batch job files, a resource that Corn says managers mine to keep their HP 3000 batch processing on track.

“I don’t think you can do anything on a 3000 for very long without realizing you need to know what’s happening in your batch environment,” Corn said. “If you don’t examine $STDLISTs, you can have problems when something goes wrong and nobody knows about it. You can also backtrack and find out what happened.”

Corn said in most 3000 datacenters staffing is pretty lean, so anything that can help track batch processes can have immediate payback. “Doing it manually doesn’t work for very long,” he said.

Since $STDLISTs exist in the HP 3000’s spool queue, the product includes extensive spoolfile handling and archiving features. Using JobAlert lets a site archive its errors in a place outside the MPE spool queue, since a cluttered queue degrades HP 3000 performance. JobAlert also does spoolfile transfer between MPE, Unix and NT systems, and its spoolfile features include post processing for bursting, aggregation and routing.

“You can do a lot of different things with it, something simple or something complicated,” Corn said. For example, JobAlert is based on a scripting language, enabling post-processing to do things like disassembling a report and routing the parts to specific addressees via e-mail.

JobAlert can change the order of print jobs, the number of copies, and target printers using its scripting language. Reports can be mailed to a list of multiple recipients based on text strings within the report, using MPE’s spool file security rules. Parts of several reports can be re-assembled into a single new report. “It offers some flexibility for those people who want to do things beyond mundane $STDLIST management,” Corn said.

The archives can be viewed through the most basic of dumb terminals for HP 3000s, and in future releases of JobAlert a browser-based graphical interface will be available for the archives. “You’d be able to browse your archives or reports through a standard Web browser,” Corn said. The feature is in development, he added.