What is CA-7?
Main frame computers normally provide access to vast database systems during the day and do all the number crunching by night. For example if you phone BT about your telephone, an Operator can get all your details up on a screen. It's when most of these 'very nice people' go home at 5pm that a sequence of several hundred programs is started to update the database and print all the phone bills. CA-7 is the software that remembers the order of these over night programs, and kicks them into the system when they can run. It also has been 'programmed' to know all the extra things that need to be done at weekends and at the end of the month when extra programs need to interleave with the daily work.

COURSES AVAILABLE
There are seven courses which people playing with CA-7 might want to attend. These are listed below:

CA-7 Basics
There are the guys and girls who are there in the evening and overnight watching CA-7 at work as it schedules the batch work. They intervene (or is that interfere) when CA-7 shouts for help. For example if a job fails or there is a change in circumstance that CA-7 is not programmed for! Such people should go on the CA-7 BASIC course regardless of how many weeks/months/years they have been doing the job. It is important that such staff go on this course and not others.
A very confusing thing is that when this is run as a public course it is 3 days, but when only one company is involved there is so much that can be left out, it is a two day course.

CA-7 Database Set-up/Maintenance
Some people get the job of 'programming' the CA-7 database. "Please run that batch program every day and after this one!" That type of thing. These are normally Operations Analysts, but they get called all sorts of things these days. They work during the day and are sometimes on call over night. These people should attend the CA-7 SCHEDULING course. There is no point sending Operators on this course!
Like the BASIC course this is three days when run as a public course and 2 days when run on-site for one company.

Advanced CA-7 Facilities
CA-7 requires a little bit of maintenance, for example each year you need to define several calendars which specify things like your bank holidays. There are also several reporting facilities so you can audit who has been doing what. Most companies have one or two people who can do these types of things on CA-7 and the CA-7 ADVANCED course is for them! People on these are expected to have been on the Scheduling Course.

Running Late
CA-7 contains a very complex facilities to enable you to flag jobs that are running later than you expect. This one day course covers this area.

Workload Balancing and Virtual Resource Management
There is a one day course which just covers these two areas of CA-7.

New Release Features
Very often new facilities are not explained to staff using CA-7, this one day course fills that gap. It goes through the product changes for release 3.1 and 3.2. Everybody is on 3.2 at the moment because it is the only version to work in the year 2000. Release 3.3 arrives during spring 2000.

REXX programming
CA-7 can do quite a lot, but not everything. The REXX course was introduced to help CA-7 users use the REXX programming language to do more with CA-7. REXX is a very useful language and you can to far more that just add new facilities to CA-7.

GO TO CA-7 BOOK CASE