IBM Personal Communications Version 13.0 for Windows operating systems
First Edition
This document contains information supplementary to the online help and the publications, including newly added functions, hints, tips, restrictions, and corrections. See the Personal Communications Information Center for other considerations when using Personal Communications Version 13.0, and for complete product documentation.
For information on installing IBM Personal Communications for Windows, refer to the Installation Guide for Installation document. Refer to Quick Beginnings for information about the new features and functionality of Version 13.0.
Names and license terms for third-party components are referenced in license.txt, which is located in the Personal Communications installation directory or in the product installation image.
Thank you for choosing Personal Communications Version 13.0.
Fonts to Scale the Entire Presentation Space
Context Menu upon Right-click Mouse Operation
"Settings" Menu to Set Session Preferences
Enhanced Visual Styles and Icons
"Alt + Enter" to Switch to Full Screen
Automatic Selection of Security Protocol
Discontinuation of IBM GSKit as the Security Package
Enhancements to HI License Manager
Introducing APIs to Copy to & from Windows Clipboard
CM Mouse and REXX EHLLAPI Reintroduced
Subscribing to Support News
IBM Support Assistant
Installing or Migrating Personal Communications with Communications Server
Displaying Arabic Data in the VBHLLAPI Sample Program
Personal Communications Version 13.0 is based on the popular Personal Communications Version 5.9. If you are familiar with Personal Communications Version 5.9, you might want to review the following new functions and enhancements.
With previous versions of IBM Personal Communications, size of the fonts of the emulator screen (a.k.a presentation space) would not increase beyond a point. On a larger monitor, this would make PCOMM to fill lot of blank area around the active presentation space. With IBM Personal Communications V13.0, True Type Fonts (.ttf) will scale up to cover the entire presentation space, in proportion to the screen resolution.
With IBM Personal Communications V13.0, right-click mouse operation on the presentation space results in a context menu. The context menu provides options to carry out basic edit operations, and session operations such as switching between sessions, saving, disconnecting and exiting sessions.
Preferences sub-menu under Edit menu has now been made available as Settings menu with IBM Personal Communications V13.0. The new Settings menu is available between the Edit and View menus.
IBM Personal Communications V13.0 offers new Windows visual styles. The product has been updated with richer icons in toolbars and menus. The emulator tool bar shows the icons along with captions by default.
With IBM Personal Communications V13.0, Recent Profiles submenu has been added under the File menu. Through this submenu, most recently used 10 emulator sessions can be accessed.
With IBM Personal Communications V13.0, an emulator session can be toggled to and fro between full screen and normal Window at the click of Alt + Enter key. A keyboard mnemonic "[fullscreen]" has been provided to map the functionality to any of the keys on the keyboard.
With IBM Personal Communications V13.0, provision to choose the security protocol between TLS 1.2, TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.0 has been removed. With the new implementation, emulator session attempts the secure connection starting with the highest protocol version - TLS 1.2. If the host does not support the security protocol, negotiation will fall down to the next lower level, up till TLS 1.0. This enhancement ensures that an end user is always connected over the highest security protocol supported by the host.
This is true with PCOMM FTP Client as well. With this release, PCOMM FTP Client support TLS 1.2, TLS 1.1, in addition to TLS 1.0. Support for SSL v3.0 has now been discontinued due to security reasons.
IBM Personal Communications V13.0 provides Microsoft Crypto API (MSCAPI) as the only security package to establish secured emulator and FTP sessions. Use of IBM GSKit as the cryptographic service provider has been discontinued.
If secured emulator sessions are configured to use IBM GSKit with previous versions of IBM Personal Communications, the personal and CA (signer) certificates will have to be migrated to Microsoft certificate store before upgrading to IBM Personal Communications V13.0.
Please use the Certificate Migration utility IBM Personal Communications -> Administrative and PD Aids to migrate the certificates from IBM GSKit to MSCAPI.
With this release, IBM Personal Communications will support both HTTPS and HTTP connections to the License Manager. In an intranet environment, when a License Manager Server is configured with local Certificate Authorities, the HTTPS connectivity from PCOMM client to the license manager may fail, due to failure in verifying the certificates received from the license manager. Following pcswin.ini keywords have been introduced to ignore these scenarios arising out of such a situation:
[License]
IgnoreUnknownCA=Y
IgnoreInvalidCertCN=Y
IgnoreCertRevCheck=Y
When IgnoreUnknownCA is set to Y, it allows an invalid certificate authority. This allows PCOMM to send License information even when the License Manager Server sends an untrusted CA certificate. This setting is recommended only under test environments. The default value of the keyword is N.
When IgnoreInvalidCertCN is set to Y, it allows an invalid common name in a certificate; that is, the server name specified by the application does not match the common name in the certificate. This setting is recommended only under test environments. The default value of the keyword is N.
When IgnoreCertRevCheck is set to Y, it ignores certificate revocation problems. This allows PCOMM to send License information even when it could not verify whether the host certificate is valid or revoked. This setting is recommended only under test environments. The default value of the keyword is N.
Please note that these keywords are recommended only under test environments.
For more details on Host Integration License Manager, refer to the technote.
Refer to Administrator's Guide and Reference for more information.
IBM Personal Communications V13.0 introduces two APIs - CopyText( ) and PasteText( ). These APIs allow an emulator application to copy the text from the presentation space to Windows clipboard, and paste the text from Windows clipboard to the emulator presentation space. The APIs are available as part of:
EHLLAPI Functions
Host Access Class Library C++
Host Access Class Library Automation Objects
Host Access Class Library for Java
You can find documentation and links to other resources at the IBM Documentation for Personal Communications Version 13.0.
To receive Personal Communications support news flashes, complete the following steps:
http://www.ibm.com/software/network/pcomm/support
The IBM Support Assistant enables you to easily resolve software questions. The Support Assistant provides the following components:
Help desk personnel and Personal Communications administrators might want to install Support Assistant in order to better support end users. The Support Assistant can be downloaded from the following address:
http://www.ibm.com/software/support/isa/index.html
If you have both Personal Communications and IBM Communications Server for Windows installed on a system, you should not use automatic migration when installing a newer version of Personal Communications.
First, remove both Personal Communications and Communications Server for Windows from the system. You should then reinstall Communications Server, before installing the new version of Personal Communications.
For proper display of Arabic data in the VBHLLAPI sample program, you should do the following:
Refer to Emulator Programming for information about the API sample programs.
At the time of installation, PCOMM allowed administrators to choose between -
With this release, PCOMM installation wizard has been updated with an option for the administrators to specify a custom application data location. This feature works similar to "All users common application data folder" where the administrators can specify a different path while installing the software. This can also be achieved with silent installation. The CUSAPPDATALOC property in the initialization (response) file generated using ONLYINI defines the behaviour.
With this release, as part of silent installation, specifying "NO_JRE=1" in the PCOMM initialization (response) file prevents PCOMM from installing IBM JRE as part of the product installation.
A PCOMM session loads customized bar file (.BAR file) by reading "BarFile" property under "[Toolbar]" section in the profile file (a.k.a, .WS file). With this release, if the .BAR file does not exist in the specified path, the file is searched for in the user profile directory.
During toolbar customization, the .BAR file will be updated with absolute path of the newly added icon files. However, with this release, if the icon files are not present in the absolute path, they are searched for under the user profile directory. This feature provides the ability to re-use the predefined toolbar files.
Apart from .BMP files, PCOMM toolbar now accepts .GIF and .JPG files as valid file types while customizing the toolbar items.
In some of the tables in the emulator presentation space, negative numbers can sometimes be represented with "-" appended to the end of the number. When such a value is copied from the presentation space and pasted on to an external application (such as Microsoft Excel), it may be desirable to expect the numeric sign to be prefixed. This can be achieved by setting the following keyword in the PCSWIN.INI file:
[Edit]With this release, PCOMM packages a new ActiveX Control file, pcsctrX.ocx. ActiveX Control can be hosted in an OLE container. An OLE container control lets you add OLE objects to your applications. OLE objects include ActiveX Controls (.OCX files) and insertable OLE objects created in other applications such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
After adding pcsctrX.ocx into an OLE container or an Automation Client, the user can start a PCOMM session in the ActiveX control by providing Session ID (optional) and the PCOMM Workstation profile. This PCOMM session will be embedded in the application. This PCOMM session inside an ActiveX supports operations based on automation objects like HACL and Emulator Programming like ELLAHPI.
For more details, please refer to:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg22014525
Starting from PCOMM V13.0.1, IBM Personal Communications fixes are delivered through fix packs. One fix pack contains the delta of the modules that have been modified. The fourth digit in the version number represents the fix pack. The current fix pack is named 13.0.1.1. You need to have IBM Personal Communications v13.0.1.0 installed on a system before applying the fix pack.
Steps to apply a fix pack
NOTE: This operation creates a backup of the current installation (delta alone) and applies the fix pack modules. For example, if you are applying 13.0.1.1 on top of 13.0.1.0 installation, a folder named backup_13.0.1.0_1 will be created.
Steps to Rollback a Fix Pack
Manufacturing fix pack 1 contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
The IBM Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is upgraded to version 1.8 SR5-FP20.
Manufacturing fix pack 2 contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
Starting from PCOMM V12.0, IBM Personal Communications fixes are delivered through fix packs. One fix pack contains the delta of the modules that have been modified. The fourth digit in the version number represents the fix pack. The current fix pack is named 13.0.2.1. You need to have IBM Personal Communications v13.0.2.0 installed on a system before applying the fix pack.
Steps to apply a fix pack
NOTE: This operation creates a backup of the current installation (delta alone) and applies the fix pack modules. For example, if you are applying 13.0.2.1 on top of 13.0.2.0 installation, a folder named backup_13.0.2.0_1 will be created.
Steps to rollback a fix pack
Manufacturing fix pack 2 contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
IBM Personal Communications has been updated to handle the new ligature. Conversion tables to translate between EBCDIC and UNICODE encoding have been updated. The new "Reiwa" ligature is supported by Host Code Pages 1399 and 1390 only.
The code signer certificate used to sign the previous versions of IBM Personal Communications software will expire on Jan 23, 2020. In the current version, the IBM Personal Communications software is signed with a new code signer certificate that is valid up to June 7, 2021.
This certificate is issued to "HCL America Inc." by "DigiCert SHA2 Assured ID Code Signing CA". "HCL America Inc." is the partner of "International Business Machines Corporation" authorized to sign IBM Personal Communications software.
This Refresh Pack contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
Bundled IBM Java Runtime Environment (JRE) has been upgraded to latest version "JRE 8.0.6.10".
This Refresh Pack contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
The code signer certificate used to sign the previous versions of IBM Personal Communications software will expire on June 07, 2021. In the current version, the IBM Personal Communications software is signed with a new code signer certificate that is valid up to April 20, 2024.
This certificate is issued to "HCL America Inc." by "DigiCert SHA2 Assured ID Code Signing CA". "HCL America Inc." is the partner of "International Business Machines Corporation" authorized to sign IBM Personal Communications software.
With this release, IBM JRE is no longer bundled with IBM Personal Communications. The features that are dependent on Java, like 'Run Applet Java' and 'HACL Java Automation', will still work with system JRE.
With this release, IBM Stand-Alone Host On-Demand is no longer bundled with IBM Personal Communications.
This Refresh Pack contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
This Refresh Pack contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
When the "Pass Through Host Certificate Validation" option is enabled, a warning pop-up regarding the attempt to connect to an untrusted server is displayed.
Users can suppress this pop-up by adding the new keyword "SuppressPassThroughPopup=Y" under the "[Security]" section in the pcswin.ini file.
The PasteText() EHLLAPI and HACL functions have been enhanced to process the <Tab> key functionality. This enhancement causes the cursor to move to the next unprotected field when the Tab character in the Windows clipboard is pasted to the PCOMM emulator screen.
PCOMM supports HTTPS connection over TLS 1.3 to connect to the IBM License Manager Server.
With this release, the PCOMM full Refresh Pack installer allows to disable the Kerberos Auto-Signon feature during the installation. When this feature is disabled, the Windows logon credentials are not intercepted by PCOMM.
The file transfer policy restriction enforced in the "Data Transfer" utility disables the switch to send/receive buttons based on the policy settings set by the user.
In this release, it does not require entering the old or Expired Passwords to update the new password.
This Refresh Pack contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.
The code signer certificate used to sign the previous versions of IBM Personal Communications software will expire on April 20, 2024. In the current version, the IBM Personal Communications software is signed with a new code signer certificate that is valid up to February 25, 2026.
This certificate is issued to "International Business Machines Corporation" by "DigiCert Trusted G4 Code Signing RSA4096 SHA384 2021 CA1".
From this release onwards, the IBM SNA stack support has been removed.
This Refresh Pack contains fixes for APARS and internal defects.