UPDATED: Content Manager OnDemand for i Lives On!
December 3, 2014 Alex Woodie
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Editor’s note: This story, which was originally published under the headline “Content Manager OnDemand For i Withdrawn In 2016,” has been updated. Content Manager OnDemand for i continues to be developed and supported by IBM. “It is alive and well,” Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development and systems management for IBM i at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, told IT Jungle on December 3. Apparently, the IBM withdrawal announcement should only have been about withdrawing CMOD for Multiplatforms version 8.5, but for some reason the entire CMOD for i product was also listed as being sent out to pasture. “We were equally shocked as everybody else,” Rowe says. IBM plans to issue a new announcement letter next week. The original story below is unchanged. IBM will stop selling Content Manager OnDemand for i (CMOD for i) in February 2015 and will stop supporting it a year later, the company announced last month. There is no direct replacement for CMOD for i in the works. However, CMOD for i customers who are current on maintenance will be able to upgrade to the latest release of CMOD for Multiplatforms, which run on the IBM i OS. CMOD is a scalable program that’s used by IBM i shops to capture, index, store, and distribute a large number of business documents, such as reports, checks, statements, and invoices, or image files like x-rays and doctor’s notes. The software typically serves as a long-term archive for documents that in the past would have been handled with paper or microfiche. According to IBM U.S. Withdrawal Announcement 914-242 dated November 11, all of the CMOD for i products that IBM sells under the product ID number 5770-RD1 will be pulled from marketing starting February 11, 2015. Some of the additional products, such as renewals for the Advanced Function Presentation Transformations Server and multilingual packs, will be available for a few more months. IBM also announced the withdrawal of CMOD for Multiplatforms version 8.5 and CMOD for z/OS 8.5. The replacement for these products are CMOD for Multiplatforms version 9.5 and CMOD for z/OS 9.5, which were both announced in late October.
There is no direct replacement available for CMOD for i, according to IBM. However, according to an IBM product specialist contacted through the IBM website, the company is positioning CMOD for Multiplatforms as the preferred replacement for CMOD for i. Customers who have current maintenance contracts will be able to get licenses for CMOD for Multiplatforms 9.5 as part of the transition, the specialist said. CMOD for Multiplatforms is designed to be a storage repository for large amounts of static content, such as customer correspondence and reports. In addition to storing the documents, it brings facilities to capture the information and for retrieving them from Web browsers and Windows clients. While IBM i is not officially listed as a supported environment on IBM’s official CMOD requirements page, IBM i is listed as one of the supported OSes in the CMOD for Multiplatforms 9.5 announcement. CMOD for i and Content Manager for iSeries (formerly called DB2 Content Manager for iSeries) have been sold and supported for more than a decade. Apparently, IBM did not have enough CMOD for i customers to justify continuing developing and supporting the software. RELATED STORIES IBM Unveils i/OS CMS Upgrades and Migration Promotions IBM Updates Content Manager with V6R1 Software Hungry IBM Eats ECM Rival FileNet for $1.6 Billion Transition Continues for DB2 Content Manager OnDemand Customers IBM Lowers Cost of DB2 Content Manager for iSeries
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