How long does it take to install and learn ASR?

Installing ASR is straight forward: you need to upload about 10 PDS libraries and then you have to configure it (as an ASR administrator) by fine tuning 1 REXX procedure that includes all the parameters to use ASR in your site. All this typically takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours.

If you also want to take advantage of ASR's capabilities to setup and maintain an archive of historical ChangeMan ZMF data (for which you can then also ASR to create reports about historical data), you should plan for a few hours or so extra (similar to what it takes to setup an extra ChangeMan ZMF housekeeping job).

To actually start using ASR (after you installed it) you need to learn about the various features available in the intuitive ISPF dialog:

• to start using ASR's catalog function (via which you can submit the reports delivered with ASR without changing the design of the report), it only takes you a few minutes (to select the report to be created and to enter a value for some report parameters).
• to clone a report into a new report (e.g. to change part of the report filter criteria, sort order, or data to be included in the output), or to create a brand new report from scratch, the ASR studio function can be used. The learning curve for this typically takes a few hours or so (depending how much of the sophisticated features you want to learn about).

Note that ASR comes with an impressive online tutorial also, which also includes field level help for any of the available reporting features.

Quite often the ASR studio function is only used (sometimes even restricted for use) by ChangeMan ZMF administrators. While the ASR catalog function is used by any type of ChangeMan ZMF user (like developers, release managers, IT auditors, security officers, etc).