Hi all,

vCSY has been working with the SIGMPE Chairs (John Burke and Donna
Garverick) and the MPE Forum Chair (Paul Edwards) to determine if it
makes sense to hold a formal System Improvement Ballot (SIB) this year.
We have reached the conclusion that there is not sufficient customer
interest to have a formal SIB '05, but vCSY will evaluate some targeted
enhancements that may have benefit for customers willing to update their
systems.

We received approximately 14 separate SIB candidates (most coming in at
the last minute) from 5 to 6 individuals.  We evaluated all of the input
and eliminated 9 of the recommendations due to one of the following
reasons: 1) high effort or risk in de-stabilizing MPE, 2) existing
functionality exits in 3rd party products or free download, 3) broad
change to MPE which impacts many subsystems and/or 3rd party products --
similar to 1.  We tended to favor suggestions with security
implications, or which are relatively low effort/risk such that there is
a higher chance of being able to deliver the patch in time for customers
to beta test and update their systems.

The most popular request was to back-port some of the MPE/iX 7.5 SIB '04
and SIB '03 items.  In that light, here are the past SIB items that vCSY
will evaluate for back-porting to 6.5 and 7.0:
    -  From SIB '04: 
       1) NW printing to non-HP printers. 
       2) FTP server security enhancements (ftpuser, ftpaccess). 
       3) CI Functions (volinfo, spoolinfo, devinfo).

    -  From SIB '03: 
       1) User Functions.

In addition to the back-porting request we will evaluate the following
customer-generated suggestions:
      1) Return the number of bytes remaining in the CI's variable
table;
      2) Support a method to RESTORE files only from a specific volume
set, 
         perhaps an ONVS= parm like STORE and REPORT use;
      3) Add security to FTP so that is doesn't require Read access for
the 
         NETRC file; and
      4) Support the 'site chmod' command in FTP.

Lastly, we will evaluate some general cleanup in the CI, especially
correcting some misleading error messages, fixing up some areas of HELP,
and perhaps a few defect repairs.

So, even without a formal SIB '05, it looks like there are valuable
SIB-like projects we can staff.  The next steps for vCSY are to:

     1) Complete the remaining SIB '04 work targeted for 7.5;
     2) Decide which past SIB items mentioned above, if any, will be
back-ported;
     3) Evaluate the user requests above, prioritize them with other R&D
projects, 
        and decide which ones can be completed in time for customers to
update and 
        test before end of support; and
     4) Evaluate the CI cleanup items to decide which, if any, can be
done and 
       delivered in the remaining time.

We appreciate the time you spent providing input for SIB '05, reviewing
material for SIB '04 items, beta testing SIB patches, etc.  If there is
an enhancement suggestion you provided that is important for your
continued use of the 3000 and is not covered above, please let me or
anyone at vCSY know.

Regards,
 Jeff Vance, vCSY

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