This post shares the best resources to get started using BMC Helix Data Manager.

BMC Helix Data Manager provides many avenues for migrating data according to your needs. Helping many customers with obstacles encountered along the way has revealed a few common opportunities to smooth this journey. I have been addressing these over the last few months with better self-service resources such as blogs, videos, a BEST FAQ, and Troubleshooting Guide. Below are recently released resources in this area.

To get started learning how to use Helix Data Manager, first see BMC Helix Data Manager 21.05.00 and 21.3 General Information and Overview

This covers how it is used as part of the upgrade, compatibility, downloading, licensing, training, documentation, and troubleshooting references. This is a great resource to start with to make sure you are aware of the best resources that are already available.

At the very bottom of the article, you will see the section with links to videos. I think videos are probably the easiest way to understand how to use the tool and tackle specific tasks. I am planning to create more videos as time permits. These videos are also available on the BMC Helix Remedy and Discovery YouTube channel with other videos created by my team. Searching on “Helix Data Manager” on YouTube is another easy way to find them.

I also recently published a BEST FAQ Knowledge Article to highlight frequently asked questions and the resources that the Customer Support most frequently recommends.  The goal is to make it easy to easy to find the answer to the question you have today, and hopefully the one you will have next too. You can find it here:

BEST FAQ on Helix Data Manager Issues

In Customer Support, we also spend a lot of time making sure there is documented troubleshooting guides to help get to the bottom of technical issues. You can find the latest here in the Troubleshooting section of BMC Helix Data Manager 21.3.  

In November 2022, I posted the blog Helix Support: Tips on Using Helix Data Manager Migration Packs to share my tips and recommendations using Helix Data Manager developing from helping customers use it.

In this post, I shared the resources I recommend for BMC Helix Data Manager. I hope they help you to solve an issue or avoid an issue completely.

I would like to hear from you. Does this information help? Are there limitations where it does not? If so, please add comments below.

Dear Customer:

BMC is writing to you today as a customer of the BMC Compuware Upstream Reservoir product.

Effective today and according to terms set out on BMC’s Customer Support site (https://www.bmc.com/support/resources/bmc-product-support-policy.html), BMC is announcing the End of Life for the BMC Compuware Upstream Reservoir product offerings.

BMC will continue to provide Limited Support for the current generally available versions of the BMC Compuware UPSTREAM product family as defined in the Product End of Life section of the BMC Product Support Policy until the end of support date of January 1, 2024. As per this policy, BMC will continue to develop hot fixes for problems of high technical impact; however, the product is considered functionally stabilized, and therefore, will not receive further enhancements during this period. There will be a period of up to seven years beyond the End of Life date where customers will be able to restore data backups created prior to January 1, 2024.

Effective today and until the End of Life date of January 1, 2024, BMC will provide customers with active support contracts the ability to access BMC Customer Support as described in this letter. Also, customers who have an active support contract will have the option to migrate their BMC Compuware Upstream Reservoir licenses to other offerings.

If you have any questions regarding this transition, please contact your BMC Account Manager at 1-855-

834-7487 and press Option 1 for Sales, or BMC Customer Support at 1-800-537-1813. To receive

updated information as it becomes available, please subscribe to our Proactive Alerts from our BMC

Support Central site.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

April Hickel

Vice President, Product Management

BMC Software

Ask the Expert(s) Sessions - 2022

Ask The Expert(s) is an opportunity for our customers to get involved in a live Q & A session with Support. These sessions are hosted by both BMC Support's Centre of Excellence and our product specific Technical Experts. This is an excellent platform for like-minded customers to collaborate and resolve their technical or product challenges and introduce new topics. Follow this page to keep a track of past and upcoming ‘Ask the Experts’ sessions.

Should you have any questions related to the past or the upcoming session or want to discuss possible product topics, please reach out to our Program Manager, Samantha Amend at samantha_amend@bmc.com.

Upcoming sessions:

Wednesday 30th November - Ask the Expert - AR Server

Click Here to Register

Click here to ask your question

Click Here for The Announcement Post

Wednesday 30th November - Ask the Expert - Digital Workplace

Click Here to Register

Click here to ask your question

Click Here for The Announcement Post

Wednesday 30th November - Ask the Expert - BMC Helix Dashboards

Click Here to Register

Click here to ask your question

Click Here for The Announcement Post

Past sessions

November:

Ask the Expert (9th Nov 2022) - TSOM - Post event Q&A

Search BMC Support now displays “Did you mean” suggested keywords to help with typos. 

If the entered keywords return few results but another word that that is only one letter off returns far more results, then that keyword is suggested.

Click on the suggested query to run it instead, as shown in the example below.

This is another step in our Focus on Self Solve Search to make it easier to find solutions.

We hope this feature makes it easier to find relevant solutions. We welcome any feedback, thoughts or questions on these new features.

Product Change Notification October 2022

Enriching customer satisfaction by providing quality information regarding product renames, replacements, and withdrawals.

PRODUCT RENAME

Complimentary and non-elective retitle of an existing product base, version, and/or marketing schedule that does not alter the feature, functionality, pricing, or existing agreements/entitlements of the product.

PRODUCT AUTO MIGRATION

Complimentary and non-elective product migration that does not result in modifications to the product’s feature and functionality. In instances where minor incremental functionality is provided, such would have otherwise been provided in connection with routine maintenance releases that all subscribers would have been entitled to.

PRODUCT OPTIONAL MIGRATION

SAAS TO SAAS CONVERSION

Paid elective product change that may result in more than minimal changes to the product’s feature, functionality, and/or license list price. In some instances, it may lead to a change in the product code, thus requiring re-installation of the product, but it should not be such that the functionality of the product produces a completely unrelated outcome. The old product rights must be forfeited upon the migration, therefore requiring customer authorization.

PRODUCT UPGRADE

Paid elective product change that consists of moving from one product or solution to another one that contains all the functionality in the original one, plus greater features, and functionality, while remaining within the same product family.

PRODUCT WITHDRAWAL

NO MIGRATION

The End of Life (EOL) of a product, which results in moving it to an Obsolete status once the Projected Obsolete Date (POD) is reached, with no option for customers to migrate it.

KEY DETAILS

Visit the "Attachments" Section to download the PDF/Excel version of this Blog post

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Please contact the appropriate Product Manager by emailing the address provided within each product change section

Continuing our efforts to help you spend more time developing mainframe programs than manually testing mainframe programs, here is our second course in the BMC Compuware Topaz for Total Test 20.x learning track.

Topaz for Total Test is an automated testing solution that enables you to test mainframe programs. Before you perform an automated test for your mainframe program using Topaz for Total Test, it is recommended to prepare your test program by performing certain key procedures using functionalities and tools available in Topaz Workbench. Knowing how to prepare your mainframe program before performing automated testing helps you achieve quicker and better results. 

This web-based course, BMC Compuware Topaz for Total Test 20.x: Fundamentals Preparing a Test Program demonstrates the process you must follow to prepare your test program and how to use the functionalities and tools in Topaz Workbench to prepare your test program. You will learn how to:

• Compile the test program with Shared Services.
• Execute Scan Utility to scan programs and identify unsupported functionalities.
• Create an Xpediter Debug Configuration.
• Execute Runtime Visualizer to generate a sequential visualization of the test program.
• Right-size data in a test program.
• Run Xpediter Code Coverage to test the execution of code.

Course Title: BMC Compuware Topaz for Total Test 20.x: Fundamentals Preparing a Test Program

Modules: 6   |   Duration: 2 hours

For more information, check the abstract here:

https://www.bmc.com/education/courses/bmc-compuware-topaz-for-total-test-20x-fundamentals-preparing-a-test-program-wbt.html

For any queries, contact education@bmc.com

We thank the efforts of our subject matter experts, who helped us create this course.