Downloadable documentation

CICS® documentation is provided for download to your environment. You can use versions of the IBM Knowledge Center on a server over your organization's intranet, or offline as a local installation on your own system. You can use the IBM Knowledge Center on Windows, AIX, Linux, zLinux, and z/OS.

The local IBM Knowledge Center looks and feels the same as the version on the internet. There are some features of the internet-hosted IBM Knowledge Center that rely on internet connections or services, so these are not available in the local version. These features include providing comments or ratings on documentation to IBM, creating personalized collections of topics, and creating PDFs from these collections. The search technology used in the local IBM Knowledge Center is different to the search technology used in the internet-hosted version so you might find some differences in the priority of results that are returned from your search query.

The information center that was provided for download with earlier releases of CICS TS can still be found in IBM® Publications Center, so information about them is included in this section. However, the content of the information center is not updated and there is no longer support for its framework. We strongly recommend that you use IBM Knowledge Center for CICS products for your local use.

The IBM Knowledge Center is a framework that you download to a local system. You can then load the framework with the documentation for CICS products. There are two versions of the IBM Knowledge Center:
IBM Knowledge Center for CICS products
This framework runs stand-alone on Windows, Linux®, or AIX®, and under an application server on Windows, Linux, AIX, or Linux for z Systems . It is available as a DVD from Shopz, GC34-7459. The DVD contains packages of the IBM Knowledge Center framework for use in different environments:
  • Windows 32-bit and 64-bit
  • AIX
  • Linux Intel 386, PPC 64-bit, and x-86, 64-bit
  • WAR file for installation under an application server.
Each package includes a readme file of instructions. The IBM Knowledge Center for CICS products is independent of the release of CICS. You need download the framework only once for any version of CICS documentation, and again only when a new version of the framework is released.

After you have installed the framework, you can load CICS documentation into it. The documentation is available at IBM Shopz . There is a package of documentation for each release of CICS TS. Each package contains a readme file of instructions. These packages are refreshed regularly.

IBM Knowledge Center for z/OS
IBM z/OS V2.2 contains a base element of IBM Knowledge Center for z/OS. If you have this level of z/OS, you can use the z/OS Softcopy Librarian feature to load CICS TS V5.3 documentation into this version of IBM Knowledge Center. See the z/OS 2.2 product documentation ("Installing, Managing, and Using the Online Library") for details about how IBM Knowledge Center for z/OS works, and how to load the latest CICS TS documentation into it.

The documentation in IBM Knowledge Center for z/OS is refreshed on a quarterly schedule that is independent of product releases and other refreshes of other sources of documentation, which can be refreshed more frequently. As a result, there might occasionally be temporary differences between the CICS TS documentation in IBM Knowledge Center for z/OS, and the documentation available for download from the IBM Shopz.