American Greetings is the world’s largest publicly-owned creator, manufacturer and distributor of greeting cards and social expression products. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings employs 20,000 associates in 28 plants around the world.

Some of American Greetings’ most critical applications for finance, payroll and order entry are handled by its IBM z/OS and OS/390 mainframes. The complexity and number of applications running on that system are quite extensive, with almost 31,000 application elements supported by eight development environments. Approximately 150 developers work in various development, production control areas and technical support capacities. The entire development, production and testing environments are housed within AllFusion™ Endevor® Change Manager (AllFusion Endevor) from Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA).

AllFusion Endevor manages all management tasks associated with the mainframe development environment through its automated transformation functionality, module relationship management, parallel development management and release automation. It eliminates the manual steps that bog down the application development process and ensures greater efficiency with fewer errors.

American Greetings needed a comprehensive development environment to satisfy several requirements. Initially, it required greater security and audit trail capabilities than previous products it had been using. American Greetings needed software version control and a way to track change management. The company also wanted a product that could extend functionality across the development organization while being easy to administer and easy for developers to learn.

AllFusion Endevor Delivers Powerful Features, Flexibility and More
Over eight years, AllFusion Endevor has provided American Greetings with extensive functionality, ease of use and a flexible source management environment. AllFusion Endevor progression features keep elements and source code together when using the MOVE feature from one environment to the other. “It’s organized by system, subsystem and type, meaning JCL, PROC or programming language,” said Tom Brown, American Greetings’ Change and Configuration Manager. “It also allows you to do searches on just the element name or by using wildcards, which helps you locate elements very quickly.”

Reporting features provide organized information on how many developers are retrieving elements out of the system or how many programs have been changed over any given time frame. AllFusion Endevor also lets American Greetings easily create new inventory locations, systems and subsystems. “That helps developers logically organize their programs so they can get through them very easily,” said Brown. In addition, AllFusion Endevor works well with other CA products. “For example, when we do a COBOL compile we use Unicenter® CA-Accuchek™ and Unicenter® CA-JCLCheck™, which expedite the compile process and ensure our precision,” he continued. “AllFusion Endevor has its own internal libraries, so it’s easy to manage parallel source development. If you need to backtrack from production, you can put in the last set of changes prior to the version you’re working on and then continue down the migration path.”

With AllFusion Endevor, American Greetings’ Y2K code remediation projects were completed without a hitch. “We set up an entirely different environment and base-lined all our source code down to this other environment we called Y2K,” said Brown. “We completed the changes and testing, and when it was time to implement the changes, we’d send it up through the normal migration path. AllFusion Endevor made everything really easy.”

Standardization and Organization Benefits Production
Brown ranks the product’s integrity as an important asset. In essence, the standardized procedures for migrating source code to production create a high level of consistency and code integrity across his development organization. “In today’s business world,” he said, “protection of your source code is right up there with people resources and company assets. If you want to get product out the door, you need that sense of security. When it’s 3:00 in the morning and you go to run a program, you need to know that it will run. With AllFusion Endevor, I know that it will, because I just don’t get phone calls in the middle of the night saying, ‘Gee, we can’t find the previous version of program A, B or C.’

“With AllFusion Endevor, we’re able to control changes going into the production system,” said Brown. “Changes don’t get lost during testing phases, and that’s important.” AllFusion Endevor requires that developers test programs at a unit level and then test them at the system level. “The advantage is that everyone is forced to use more organization—more and more checks. Everyone does things in a similar way, ensuring our standards are met, and that provides consistency and takes some of the guesswork out of development,” Brown adds. AllFusion Endevor also provides tighter security, protecting underlying libraries so that programmers can’t go in and mistakenly or intentionally tinker with things.

Fast and Easy Training
CA’s administrator course for AllFusion Endevor helped Brown get a big jump on mastering the product. The course provides hands-on training for building packages, setting up environments, and creating systems and subsystems. “Despite the complexity and extensive features built into AllFusion Endevor, I could migrate packages within 2–3 days of training, put my own packages together and do displays on my own.” Training for American Greetings’ 150 developers is minimal. “After about two or three hours of hands-on training, the developers feel comfortable enough to use it proficiently,” said Brown. “CA tech support is also very helpful. I log into the CA-TCC: Total Client CareSM site to learn about new issues, search for specific topics and download fixes when necessary.” Brown also goes to a CA user group called OKIE (a group comprised of AllFusion Endevor and AllFusion™ Harvest users throughout Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana) where users share experiences and meet with CA representatives who provide additional product insights.

Continued Development With AllFusion Endevor
American Greetings recently upgraded to the latest release of AllFusion Endevor, Version 3.9. Brown is enthusiastic about its enhanced audit ability and reporting capabilities, email system interfaces (for approval notifications), and compatibility enhancements for DB2 Versions 6.1 and 7.1. Down the road he expects to integrate AllFusion Harvest and AllFusion Endevor for a complete change management solution. AllFusion Harvest will help synchronize development activities on heterogeneous platforms across the enterprise and throughout the entire application development life cycle. Through bi-directional integration with AllFusion Endevor, AllFusion Harvest will extend change and configuration management (CCM) support to the mainframe, providing unparalleled levels of CCM support for the enterprise.