CLASY™ - Personal Services Library Administration System

🙘 Document archival & retrieval for your IBM Office system 🙚

The problem of document pool growth

Personal Services stores all In-Basket and File Cabinet items in a shared data set called the document pool. As users create and distribute items, the document pool grows. Over time, the document pool fills up with many items that are no longer used. This unmanaged growth is a problem because:

• the unused items occupy valuable online space
• Personal Services response slows
• the document pool can quickly grow out of control; some organizations have even encountered the VSAM data set size limit of 4 gigabytes!
• as In-Baskets and File Cabinets get cluttered with old items, users find it increasingly difficult to locate the items they want to work with

Personal Services doesn't include any tools for monitoring the document pool or managing its growth. If your users don't delete old items, you have no choice but to increase the size of the document pool. And office system users are reluctant to delete items, not only because of the time it takes, but also in case they delete something they will need in future.

   

The solution: CLASY

CLASY archives items that users no longer use and deletes them from the document pool. Items are archived when they are created, and whenever they are updated. As long as an item is being referenced, the original item remains in the document pool, and a copy is located in the CLASY archive. When the item is no longer referenced, CLASY deletes the original item from the document pool. The copy in the archive remains available to users.

   

Why is CLASY deletion based on when an item was last referenced?

The age of an item doesn't necessarily indicate how actively it is referenced. Sometimes an old item, such as last year's budget, may be in regular use, while a relatively new item, such as a memo, may be referenced only once. By deleting items only after they are no longer referenced, CLASY automatically keeps the first type of item in the document pool as long as necessary, and weeds out the second type as soon as possible.

   

What types of items does CLASY manage?

In general, CLASY manages all items that can be sent to a user. This includes:

• notes
• messages
• editable items
• revisable items
• final-form items
• external references
• personal computer files

CLASY doesn't archive those types of items that are inappropriate for archiving, such as Calendar notifications, personal address books and distribution lists, undeliverable items, and shared items that are filed under the Personal Services administrator's user ID.

   

What can users do with items in the CLASY archive?

• retrieve items that CLASY deleted from the document pool
• retrieve items that users themselves deleted from the document pool
• retrieve previous versions of items
• list all the tags used by their archived items
• send archived items to other users

In addition, CLASY provides Trash Can and Shred features that extend Personal Services functionality for OfficeVision/MVS users. The Trash Can feature lets users delete items from their In-Baskets and File Cabinets in a way that keeps these items available until a special Delete job clears them.

The Shred feature lets users delete items not only from their In-Baskets and File Cabinets, but also from their archive lists. This ensures that the items cannot be retrieved, even after CLASY has put copies of the items in the archive. The Trash Can and Shred features integrate into In-Basket and File Cabinet panels, so no special training is needed.

   

How do users retrieve archived items?

Users retrieve archived items using the CLASY "Work with Archive" panels. These panels operate like "Work with In-Basket" and "Work with File Cabinet" panels, so no special training is required. Users list their archived items and select items for retrieval from the list.

   

How do items get deleted from the document pool?

CLASY deletes items when they are no longer referenced. CLASY has powerful selection features that make it possible to delete according to such things as:

• user ID
• item activity
• document type
• item location (for example, In-Basket or File Cabinet)
• document name

   

How often are items deleted?

Your office system administrator determines how often to run the CLASY Delete utility. This utility should be run on a regular basis, perhaps weekly or monthly.

   

Can CLASY delete anything other than items that are no longer referenced?

CLASY can delete items by age. This lets you delete really old items when you first install CLASY. It also lets you delete special items that have a short lifespan.

CLASY can also delete items that Personal Services may not be able to delete, such as:

• temporary items that are left over when users make print requests that don't complete successfully
• damaged items that contain non-displayable characters
• incomplete items that have entries in the DRD but no corresponding DPD records

   

What is the office system administrator's role regarding CLASY?

Your office system administrator will likely be involved in both the planning and operation of CLASY. The administrator sets up CLASY to implement your organization's document management policies regarding:

• what types of items to manage
• how often to copy items to the archive
• how long to leave unreferenced items in the document pool before deleting them
• how often to process users' retrieve requests
• whether to limit the number of items that users can retrieve in one day

The administrator also ensures that CLASY runs scheduled jobs to copy and delete items. And the administrator can retrieve items from the archive on behalf of other office system users.

   

Does CLASY provide any tools to help the administrator?

With CLASY, the administrator can:

• maintain CLASY's online directory of archived items (the CLASY Index); index items can be copied, moved, deleted and renamed.
• check and change the status of retrieve and delete requests
• check and control CLASY monitoring, which tracks item activity
• consolidate backups onto fewer data sets or volumes

   

A few technical details

CLASY is easy to install. It will take your system programmer about a day to install and test CLASY. And you can customize many aspects of CLASY, such as:

• the schedule for background retrieve and delete jobs
• the items CLASY is to back up
• the language in which to run CLASY
• whether to make CLASY functions available from OfficeVision/MVS and PS/CICS
• the text of messages, panels and reports
• defaults
• "Work with Archive" PF key definitions
• transaction names
• whether to make CLASY screen items for backup

You don't have to stop your office system to run CLASY. It is designed to work whether your office system is running or not. When your office system is running, CLASY communicates with it to ensure the integrity of the document pool.

CLASY is secure. Normally, only the owner of an item looks it up in the archive list and retrieves it. The administrator can look up and retrieve an item on behalf of another user, but cannot read the contents of this item. CLASY always sends the retrieved item to its owner.

TBS Software is committed to making products work with all versions of IBM products. If IBM supports it, we support it. As part of this committment, CLASY works with:

• all versions of z/OS, OS/390 and MVS (MVS/370, MVS/XA and MVS/ESA)
• all versions of CICS
• OfficeVision/MVS Release 1 or later
• PS/CICS Version 1.3 or later

In addition, CLASY works in environments with multiple CICS regions and Personal Services transaction families.

CLASY works with IBM's DFHSM or equivalent storage management system. You can put incremental backups on disk and let HSM migrate them to tape automatically. If you don't have a storage management system, you can let CLASY automatically stack incremental backups on tape.

   

How can I tell how much CLASY would benefit me?

If you want to get an idea of the number of items in your document pool according to document type and age, you can get a free copy of TBS Software's Document Pool Analysis utility (PS-DAN). This utility provides a one-page report that tells you at a glance whether you need CLASY to help you clean up your document pool. Many organizations who requested PS-DAN discovered that 50% of the items in their document pools were more than six months old!

You can also discover first-hand how CLASY can benefit your organization by installing it for a free 30-day trial. CLASY lets you simulate the deletion of items from the document pool, which allows you to easily assess the amount of document pool storage you could recover by letting CLASY archive items.

   

The bottom line

With CLASY, you can:

• manage document pool growth
• make items available to users for a longer time than is possible without an archiving system
• provide a safety net in case users delete items by mistake
• reduce In-Basket and File Cabinet clutter by removing items that are no longer referenced

Technical Support

Contact technical support for details on downloading CLASY fixes.