Summer 2026 Edition
“Better late than never” is the saying, and very true for me these last few months since the ASAP conference in May. In fact I had planned to publish this newsletter right after the conference but a few big life events and generally being very busy have caused some delay.
I plan to publish a more detailed newsletter in October, but for now I just want to cover a few points especially for those planning to migrate to a new zWS release in the upcoming months.
For life events
I am training a new “assistant”, a goldendoodle just 7 months old as I write this. Jameson “Jamie” has been a challenge. He ate ALL of the powerpoint presentations I prepared for the ASAP conference, so I had to re-do them. He has “zoom” mode and “sleep” mode. Jamie has been learning enough about JWT’s and xml files to be a real help, when he is not biting my hands or feet.
Bigger news was the birth of my granddaughter Haven Spencer Viola on June 7, 2026.
Onto the news I want to share:
(1) zWS 10.1 is NOT going out of support in April 2027- only the distributed Workload Automation 10.1 product is going out of support. The end of support for zWS 10.1 has not even been announced yet.
(2) Migration to 10.2 zWS release — it was announced recently that it is no longer possible to do a “reverse migration” from 10.2 to an earlier release. This will be enforced beginning with 10.2 SPE5 (SPE10205) as an error message will be issued if a backwards migration is attempted. However for any level of 10.2, backwards migration is not supported and will not work correctly. This means that it is even more important to do as much testing as possible before committing to stay on the 10.2 release after a migration, by turning on job submission. Once you begin to run jobs under 10.2 there is no going back- if you think you need to go back or have some issue that is causing 10.2 not to work correctly for you, open a support case right away. Be sure to have all the HIPERS for 10.2 applied before migrating to 10.2, and if you are not fully caught up with 10.2 maintenance, you should at least receive via SMP/E all the available 10.2 PTF in case you should need to apply any after the migration to fix an issue.
(3) 10.2 SPEs — there were a number of issue found after SPE4 (SPE10204) started to be used so pay close attention to the technote about additional action holds:
ZWSTECHNOTE : Additional ACTION HOLD items for PH68599 ( SPE10204 or 10.2 SPE4 ) for z Workload Scheduler 10.2
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7257423
So for there have been no issue with SPE5 except for a mention of the reverse migration issue covered above. If anything new is found it will be added to this technote:
ZWSTECHNOTE : Additional ACTION HOLD items for PH71235 ( SPE10205 or 10.2 SPE5 ) for z Workload Scheduler 10.2
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7278281
(4) HIPERS for 10.1 and 10.2 — I have fallen behind on the technotes that list all the latest HIPERS. I will revise the technote but for now I want to list the latest HIPERS for 10.2 (from 2026) and the last few HIPERS for 10.1 (these were in 2025, there have not been any 10.1 HIPERS so far in 2026). Here is the list:
10.2 HIPERs for 2026:
PH71825 CUMULATIVE APAR FOR S0C4 ABEND OF NMM AND GS TASKS AND ADDITIONAL MINOR ISSUES
UO08549 superceded by UO08602
PH69864 PIF program ends with U3999 abend.
UO06682
PH70353 POSSIBLE RECORDS SKIPPED DURING THE MIGRATION TO 10.2 RELEASE
UO07438
PH71460 MINOR ISSUES ON MANDATORY PENDING PREDECESSORS
UO08101 superceded by UO08602
10.1 HIPERS 2025
PH67563 PROBLEM CONVERTING CP1 AND CP2 DURING TWS MIGRATION
UO05673 superceded by UO06229
UO05674
PH67895 MESSAGE EQQM991E WHEN CREATING OR MODIFIYING ORDERS WITHIN THE CURRENT PLAN.
UO05238 superceded by UO06229
UO05239
PH68101 IN PANEL EQQXSRTL, AFTER ENTERING VALUES ON SORT ORDER & DIRECTION, IT WILL GO BACK TO PREVIOUS PANEL.ENTERED VALUES WERE REMOVED
UO05038 Korean
UO05039 English
UO05040 German
UO05041 Kanji
UO05042 Spanish
PH68492 WAPL DBMODE(UPDATE) SHOWS PROBLEMS WITH GENERIC UPDATES. ONLY THE LAST ROW IS UPDATED.
UO05798 superceded by UO08289
UO05799 superceded by UO08290
CONCLUSION
That’s all I wanted to cover today. There will be much more detail in the October edition.I’m looking forward to the ASAP webinar series and of course to ASAP 2027 which will be in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
On a very sad note, the untimely passing of Mark Neibuhr (SMPO team) was a shock I think to all who knew him. And incredibly just a few days ago August 7, 2026 marked 12 years from the equally untimely passing of Cy Atkinson. This newsletter will forever (I hope) be Cy’s Corner, and when someone else takes over from me, maybe they will make fewer typos (and get the newsletter published on schedule).
