• June 14, 2015 - General availability of ReQuest for MQ Version 6 for zOS mainframe platforms. Highlights of the enhancements and newly introduced features include:

z/OS specific enhancements:

- ReQuest V 6 has been validated on all current versions of z/OS including z/OS 2.1.

- Support for MQ 8.0 on z/OS. This is in addition to the earlier announced support for MQ 8.0.0 on distributed platforms.

Enhancements applicable to all platforms (these enhancements were already included in the earlier announced ReQuest for MQ Windows, Unix and Linux platforms, but are no also available on the z/OS platform):

- Enhanced reporting of “Message Properties”: ReQuest reports now show eventual message properties as a readable XML string, in the same syntax as used by the RFH2 variable data.

- Improved support for long messages: MQ writes long messages in segments to the recovery log (i.e. a single PUT record, and one or more PUTPART records). The amount of data available in the actual PUT log record can vary from only a few bytes, up to at most 256KB on distributed platforms, or only 3650 bytes on z/OS. ReQuest now combines PUT and PUTPART log records up to at least 256KB (or up to the total length of the message if shorter) in a single PUT record on all platforms, allowing filtering and “Enhanced Property handling” significantly, and reducing the size of several reports. Please note that for messages longer than 256KB the eventual remaining PUTPART log records continue to be reported as before.

For the distributed platforms, the following additional enhancements were included in the earlier announced ReQuest for MQ Windows, Unix and Linux platforms.

- Configuration data for, and statistics collected by Log Manager are stored in local repositories at the actual agent(s). This simplifies the configuration and increases the reliability of Log Manager as the dependencies on network components and external database servers have been eliminated. With this new capability we have also reintroduced the ability to use an embedded Derby database for the Central Configuration data, facilitating initial setup for evaluation purposes, and/or permanent setup for smaller installations that only need to deploy one single Client instance.

- The user interface (Client GUI) no longer has a separate navigator item for “Log Managers”. The “Agent” nodes have been expanded to show all known queue managers at each agent, and allow defining “Log Managers” as required.

• February 16, 2015 - Cressida SynQuest™ for IBM® MQ Version 3.1 has been made generally available. SynQuest is a production strength replication and synchronization tool that is designed to keep the content of MQ queues on separate queue managers either synchronised or mirrored. SynQuest provides a MirrorQ solution for maintaining disaster recovery backups of queue data in those cases where a hardware (i.e. mirrored disks) solution is impractical, and/or to maintain a lasting history of messages for accounting or auditing purposes. New version highlights include:

• - Support for MQ 8.0. The full list of supported MQ versions is now MQ 7.1, 7.5, 8.0
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  - SynQuest has been further enhanced to fully support multi-vendor Windows, Linux and Unix platforms multi-instance queue managers handling and processing both as source and as target for replication and synchronization.
  
  
• - The SynQuest Plug-in supports MQ Explorer 7.1 or higher. In addition, Version 3.1 has been extended to allow configuring SynQuest for remotely connected queue managers at version 7.0.1 (queue managers at higher versions of MQ may either be locally or remotely connected to MQ Explorer).