What CMOD Functions You Can Access Via New Nav

September 26, 2022 Alex Woodie

IBM made a lot of news in May with the launch of IBM i 7.5 and Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.3. One of the items that you may have missed in the avalanche of news was the unveiling of a new interface in IBM Navigator for i (a.k.a., New Navigator) that gives access to Content Manager OnDemand for i (CMOD) functionality.

CMOD, as you probably know, is a licensed application from IBM that has been around for decades, which means there has to be a good number of customers using it for essential business functions. While paper sometimes seems like it’s going the way of the Dodo bird, the ubiquity of documents implemented in some digital format, such as PDF, appears to have a long life ahead of it, and therefore so do products like CMOD.

CMOD is designed to capture, index, store, and enable retrieval of documents, such as credit card statements, utility bills, check images, and the like. Once the CMOD software extracts indexed fields from the application generating the document, CMOD stores the data in a Db2 for i database, where it can be quickly referenced and pulled up if necessary from high-speed disk. As documents age, CMOD can be set up to automatically migrate them to more efficient media, such as tape, optical drives, and the cloud for long-term archiving.

In May, when IBM officially unveiled IBM i 7.5 and 7.4 TR6, one of the many smaller announcements it made was the delivery of a new user interface in IBM i Navigator, IBM’s strategic new user interface for IBM i.

According to IBM, users will be able to access certain administrative and user functions in CMOD via IBM i Navigator. The administrative functions include:

• Defining storage media to which data can be migrated;
• Defining monitors to allow data to be automatically loaded from directories or output queues;
• And defining policies for migrating data to various storage media and expiring data.

Users with read-only access in CMOD can also access functions in New Nav. Those functions include:

• The ability to list, start, end, and set current instances;
• The ability to list, display, add, change, and remove disk pools, Network File System (NFS) disk pools, cloud storage resources, optical storage groups, optical volumes, tape devices, tape volumes, and migration policies.
• The ability to list levels, display levels, add levels, change levels, and remove levels of migration policies;
• The ability to list directory monitors;
• And the ability to list output queue monitors.

In the future, IBM plans to give users the ability to display, add, change, and remove tape drives; to start, end, add, change, and remove directory monitors; and the ability to start, end, add, change, and remove output queue monitors.

IBM sells two other versions of the Content Manager family, including Content Manager Enterprise Edition, which provides a full content management solution for AIX, Linux, Windows, and Linux on IBM Z environments; as well as Content Manager OnDemand for Multiplatforms, which is designed more for capturing and distributing electronic reports.

IBM is currently shipping Content Manager OnDemand for i 7.4, which was launched in April 2019, according to this IBM webpage for CMOD. The product goes by the IBM product ID 5770-RD1. The new UIs for New Nav were expected to ship in the second quarter. For more information, see www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6578747.

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