ITM 6.1 Fixpack 04 - New features

ITM Fixpack 04 was released last week and the readme document contains detailed information about its features. But, for those who are short in time in this holiday season, we will give you a quick overview of its features.

New way to install fixpacks

Seems like the itmpatch command is gone for the good. The new way to install fixpack is similar to the initial ITM installation (install.sh or setup.exe) and you can upgrade multiple components with single invocation of installer.

Vmware & Windows Vista & DB2 9.1 support

Fixpack 04 added support for Windows 2003 on VMware ESX Server as the "tier1" platform. In addition, portal client is now officially supported on Windows Vista platforms.

Also, DB2 UDB 9.1 is now officially supported for TEPS and Warehouse.

Minor improvements WPA & Portal

Trailing whitespace characters in WPA are now removed. This might seem trivial but depending upon the amount of data collected in the history tables, this might save some significant space on your harddisk.

Also, there are some "cosmetic" improvements to Topology views to format its appearance.

Fixes

There were plenty of fixes addressed in this release. If you have stability issues with ITM 6.1, this fixpack is definitely worth taking a look. And since, there are not many new features introduced in this fixpack, I would hazard a guess that the upgrade will NOT be that exciting :-)

Wish list

As you can see, the big blue Santa did not bring out support for Oracle or Solaris fully yet. I remember seeing somewhere that Oracle support will be added either at FP04 or 6.2, but can't remember which one.

Featurewise, this is a "lameduck" fixpack waiting for 6.2 release. But if IBM's idea is to introduce new features in one fixpack (e.g. FP03) and address stability issues on the other (e.g. FP04), I really like the idea as it would provide customers with a stable ITM environment.

If you are still at Fixpack 02 or lower, you must upgrade to this release so you are not left behind too far and also to gain all the nice features that FP03 introduced. Also, if your environment is having stability issues, this fixpack is definitely worth taking a look.