What is Mainframe Subsystem Support?

Mainframe Subsystem Support (MSS) is a facility that enables CICS, IMS and JCL applications that have been migrated from the mainframe to be maintained, developed and deployed on Windows or UNIX platforms.

You use the COBOL development system Enterprise Developer for maintaining your CICS, IMS and JCL applications. An MSS-specific project type is supplied with the IDE to help you develop such applications. If you are working with CICS, you can edit and compile BMS maps, and also compile the CICS programs, using the Micro Focus CICS preprocessor, which translates the CICS commands into native code. If you are working with IMS, you can edit and generate your DBDs, MFSs and PSBs, and compile your IMS programs. If you are working with JCL, you can edit and create JCL, and build projects containing the programs that the JCL references. When the application is ready to run, you then deploy it to the COBOL run-time server Enterprise Server.

You use Enterprise Server for running your CICS, IMS and JCL applications, for testing and for production use. Enterprise Server also provides facilities for monitoring and controlling your applications and for other tasks such as maintaining CICS resource definitions and viewing the system catalog and spool queues.

Important: If you are using an IBM MQ client or server and have not installed them in the default location, you must use the ES_MQ_LIB environment variable (or the ES_MQ_LIB_T environment variable for threaded environments) to identify the full name including the path of the IBM MQ library appropriate to your platform. (In AIX environments the library is an object inside a shared object.)