The owner and application sections of the note pad name are required. The function and qualifier sections are optional.

The intended purpose of the owner section is to provide uniqueness so that the note pad names used by different software vendors will not conflict with each other. For IBM® software, the owner name typically begins with the component prefix or perhaps SYSxxx where xxx is the component name (hence the restriction that note pad names beginning with the letters A to I and SYS be reserved for use by IBM). For the OEM software community, various naming conventions are used to avoid conflicts. As described in Software Delivery Standard Packaging Rules for z/OS-Based Products, vendors can send a request to element@us.ibm.com to register a prefix (component code) with IBM. The registration ensures that your component code is not used by other products that are also registered. Implementing your application to allow the installation to optionally set the owner section of your note pad name provides a mechanism to overcome any potential name conflicts that might arise from products that have not registered with IBM.

The intended purpose of the application section is to provide uniqueness so that the note pad names used by different applications from a given software vendor will not conflict with each other. For example, a given software vendor might have two different products, each of which needs to have its own note pad. The vendor could assign each product a unique name for the application section of the note pad name.

The intended purpose of the function section is to enable a given vendor application to use multiple note pads. For a given application, two or more note pads might be used in support of the various functions or services provided by the application.

The intended purpose of the qualification section is to enable a given application function to make use of more than one note pad. Alternatively, this section might be used to distinguish among multiple instances of an application that might be running in the same sysplex. For example, there might be a production version of the application and a test version of the application. Or it might be used to distinguish among different releases of an application that might be running in the same sysplex.

The owner section of the note pad name is used by XCF when choosing a coupling facility structure to host the note pad. The owner and application sections of the note pad are used when calling SAF to verify that the program is authorized to perform a given request. Given these uses, there might be cases where the application provider might choose to incorporate instance or release level information into either the owner section of the note pad name, or application section, or both, instead of using the qualification section for this purpose.

IBM suggests that you implement your application so that the installation has the option of setting your note pad names. A reasonable default name should be provided to simplify note pad configuration for installations that do not need to perform local customization. If you implement your application so that the installation has the option of setting the note pad names, you will maximize the ability of the system programmers to configure your note pads and their note pad structures in a way that best suits the needs and goals of the installation. For example, the option to set the owner section would allow the installation to direct the placement of note pads to specific coupling facility structures. The option to set the qualification could allow the installation to distinguish production note pads from test note pads.

The installation and configuration documentation for your application should indicate the default names of your note pads and describe how these names can be customized by the installation.