We performed a comparison between BMC Compuware ISPW and OpenText ChangeMan ZMF based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, BMC, Microsoft and others in Software Configuration Management."One of the features that the developers like is that they can retrieve what they need with the tool. They don't have to go through some process or request something be done by another team. They can get the programs they need, compile them, retrieve the JCL and alter the JCL if they need to, and put these programs wherever they need to go for their testing."
"It does our CICS NEWCOPYs and our Db2 binds for us, whereas before, that was a manual process. It takes a lot of the workload off of the operations folks and off the DBAs."
"I think the most valuable features are code management, code deployment, and code generation. The fact that those three features are included makes BMC Compuware ISPW a robust product. If one of those features was missing, it would be less robust and less interesting. But because it has those three features, it is a very good solution for code development and management."
"The visual ability to see potential downstream impacts to changes being made assists our developers in understanding the impact associated with their change."
"We had parallel development before, but the way ISPW implements it is better. It has more control and oversight of the process, whereas before, it was like the Wild West. Everybody could have their own package with their own version of the component in it... ISPW is constantly aware of it. It notifies when someone else is using or has a different version of that component."
"Scalability is great. It has absolutely met every need for us so far. We do have some concurrent development paths and we're able to flexibly assign variables. At the same time, our skeletons assemble where we want them to, so the scalability is very good."
"We audit once a year for our ChangeMan access, accurate financial programs, and all of that. Auditors really love ChangeMan for how easy it is to get through and how tight the security is on it. Our internal auditors, external auditors, and SOX editors love this solution. We're in the healthcare business, so HIPAA regulations and all such things are a big deal, and this makes all that really simple."
"One thing I would really like to see some improvement on is the promotion diagnostic messages. It invokes utilities "under the covers" to copy components, and it does not echo back any of the error messages from those utilities."
"The solution could be improved by being better integrated with the open world. In the next release, I would like to have the ability to work in an open environment whilst remaining integrated with the legacy environment."
"When you're setting up the parameters for how ISPW will work in your shop, there are a lot of questions that have to be answered... BMC Compuware should have more in-depth explanations about what the choices in each question mean. If you pick A, what does that mean has to happen? What does that impact? If you pick B, what does that mean? What does that impact?"
"Better discussions to identify inventory prior to the start of any migration would be helpful for potential clients that have applications with code that is not modified often."
"There are some features that are not well documented, so documentation could use a little help, on things like setting up deployment and which structures in the database correspond to which tables."
"I would like to see them enable parallel development for online. It's available now for batch stuff on the mainframe. Jenkins, IBM, and Rocket all supposedly already have safe and workable version of Git for the mainframe. With that in mind, we need to know where our feature is."
"As such, there's nothing wrong with the product. It is great, but there are small things that can be better to make it much more friendly. The way you navigate through fields can be improved. If I'm going to stage a component over something that exists and that I've created in another library, and I want to pull it in and write it over what I've got there in my package, I've got to type in that data set name every time. That can be aggravating. It is not a big deal. The way things are sorted can also be improved. If you're doing a delete of a bunch of components, you can't sort those out by type or anything. Some things are just standard, and you can't look at them in a way that would be helpful."
Earn 20 points
BMC Compuware ISPW is ranked 2nd in Software Configuration Management with 5 reviews while OpenText ChangeMan ZMF is ranked 5th in Software Configuration Management. BMC Compuware ISPW is rated 8.6, while OpenText ChangeMan ZMF is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of BMC Compuware ISPW writes "Tracks code during the change process so that more than one group could have code checked out for change. ISPW provides this tracking info real time helping move toward a more Agile environment". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText ChangeMan ZMF writes "Very flexible with Johnny-on-the-spot tech support". BMC Compuware ISPW is most compared with Endevor, whereas OpenText ChangeMan ZMF is most compared with Endevor.
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