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Thank you for submitting your Request For Enhancement. After evaluating your submission, the decision at this time is to not provide this support.
The CEAC has reviewed this requirement and recommends that IBM view this as a medium priority requirement that should be addressed.
Background: The COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) members have a broad range of experience in working with small and medium-sized IBM i customers. CEAC has a key role in working with IBM i development to help assess the value and impact of individual RFEs on the broader IBM i community, and has therefore reviewed your RFE.
For more information about CEAC, see http://www.comeur.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3285
Dawn May - CEAC Program Manager
The problem with the Tabs support is that it groups all the sessions in one window so you can only see one session at a time. When the sessions are in separate windows you can have them visible at the same time on modern monitors. So Tabs support doesn't meet our users' requirements.
The problem we face is that there is no major benefit as far as the ordinary user, who just uses 5250, is concerned when they move from the old Client Access to ACS. So it is important that the new ACS 5250 replicates all the functions available in the old Client Access 5250 otherwise users understandably see the move to ACS as a negative.
The icon is in the .jar file and it is possible to change it using tools that can manipulate .jar files. So it presumably it would not be difficult to include an option in the ACSConfig.properties file to specify a path to an alternative icon. Ideally it needs to be system-specific so specifying the path to the icon may need to be done in System Configurations.
However even if it was not system-specific we could have separate configurations and .jar files for each IBM i system. That makes maintenance more complicated for us but at least as far as users are concerned it works as they expect it to.
I'll suggest you leverage our tabs support. For lots of sessions, it is useful to have the tabs on the side (instead of the top). This will allow you to see the entire tab. You can also customize the colors and content of the tab. This should eliminate the need for a different icon. I have attached a file TabsRight.png. The tab customizations are available at:
Edit->Preferences->Tab Setup...
I selected "Tab Placement" - Right (on the General tab)
The "Appearance" tab allows you to customize the colors and font for the tabs.
Edit->Preferences->Appearance->Tab Appearance....
This option allows you to select what goes in the tab.
Does this meet your requirement?
IBM has received this requirement and is evaluating it. A response will be provided when evaluation is complete.
Having different icons for sessions to different systems makes it very clear to select a session for the right system. Watermarks are some help but you have bring that session's window into focus and read the screen to check the watermark. Also having a watermark that is visually arresting enough gets in the way of reading the text on the screen.
To show what I mean, attached are two screenshots of the Windows taskbar. The "Taskbar-Client Access" screenshot shows some old Client Access 5250 sessions connected to two IBM i systems. It is easy and quick to select the right session for each system; one has a black icon and one has a yellow icon. The "Taskbar-ACS" screenshot shows the same number of sessions connected to the same two IBM i systems. It is much harder to quickly and confidently select a session for a particular system.
The same visual selection by the different icons also applies when looking at the full desktop. It is easier, faster, and less error prone, to pick out a session for the right system by looking at the icon in the window title, rather than having to actually read the session title or watermark.
I hope that better explains the reason behind the request.
Attachment (Description): See my rely posted today (18th Jan)
Attachment (Description): See my reply posted today (18th Jan)
When changing the icon for a 5250 session in IBM i Access for Windows as described, the icon in the 5250 session title bar gets updated as mentioned. However, for us, the Windows Task bar does not get updated and remains as the default icon with all the 5250 sessions cascaded behind it. For ACS, all open windows are cascaded behind the ACS "i" blue circle icon. When clicking that icon in the Task bar, all ACS windows appear for selection. If the displayed title bar is not sufficient for helping your users distinguish the correct system, another option available in ACS is to add a watermark to your 5250 sessions and make it unique per system. Edit->Preferences->Watermark... Does that meet the requirement?