Change Manager Enterprise Workbench, also known as CMEW, is going to be End-of-Life as of March, 31st, 2025. While it served organizations with both Endevor and Harvest SCM for many years, much of what it was originally built to do is now obsolete and can be done via different tools and/or practices. CMEW has been functionally stabilized since 2015 and now the time has come to move any remaining use of this tool to more modern options.
There are three key use cases that CMEW addresses:
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Synchronized promotion of “Enterprise” changes for applications with components spanning distributed and mainframe
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Access to Endevor operations such as Element editing from developer workstations
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Web-based / online approval of packages used for code promotion
Let’s look at each of these core functions and their replacements.
Synchronized promotion of “Enterprise” changes for applications with components spanning distributed and mainframe
When promoting code in either Harvest or Endevor, a package is used. In both cases, the package serves as a way to group individual updates together and provides a mechanism to review changes and provide controls such as approvals for promoting the change through the SDLC. An enterprise package is a concept in CMEW that allows users to group packages in either system together. The value of synchronizing changes for multi-platform applications still has merit but there are more modern ways of achieving this. Release Orchestration tools like Nolio, Automic or Ansible or even CICD tools like Jenkins can interact with both Harvest and Endevor to execute packages. This is easily facilitated with command line interface (CLI) scripting regardless of the choice of orchestrator. To that end, we recommend replacing this function with whichever orchestrator your organization uses, enabled by the Harvest CLI and/or Endevor plugin for Zowe CLI depending on your specific use case. A more detailed description of package automation via Zowe CLI for Endevor can be found on the Modern Mainframe blog site.
Access to Endevor operations such as Element editing from developer workstations
In the past, many SCMs provided access to their centralized repositories via interactive web applications. While this can still be seen to some degree with Enterprise Git platforms, developers primarily use CLIs or IDE extensions to interact with central servers for most of their day-to-day source control operations. Endevor provides IDE extensions for both Eclipse and VS Code-based IDEs, and the Endevor plugin for Zowe CLI provides a Git-like user experience for check-in and check-out from a central server. We recommend migrating to these ways of interacting with Endevor.
Web-based / online approval of packages used for code promotion
Package approval via online web applications is easier than ever. Endevor has recently launched a brand new, mobile-friendly web application for approving packages. Using the new application, stakeholders can review and approve packages and see changes that are contained within a handy diff viewer.
Harvest also has a mobile package approval web app that can be used in place of CMEW. We recommend using these newer interfaces instead of CMEW.
Summary
Endevor and Harvest continue to evolve with market needs. While the time has come to say goodbye to Change Manager Enterprise Workbench, users of Endevor and Harvest continue to be well-supported with newer, more modern interfaces. Broadcom would like to make your migration to these new components as straightforward as possible. Should you need assistance with developing a migration strategy or performing the actual migration, we can help. For more information about services and how you can leverage our experience, visit Services or open a ticket with our support team.