You can use IBM® WebSphere® MQ to enable applications to communicate at different times and in many diverse computing environments. WebSphere MQ is messaging for applications. The main use of WebSphere MQ is to send or exchange messages. Applications communicate with each other by exchanging messages on queues. An application or administrator creates a queue or a topic. Queues and topics are objects that are owned and stored by a queue manager. When your application wants to transfer data to another application, it puts the data into a message. It puts the message onto a queue, or publishes the message to a topic.

Installing the WebSphere MQ plug-in in your Tivoli Workload Scheduler environment, you can define, schedule, and monitor WebSphere MQ message queues. You can manage mixed processes, where multiple background workflows synchonize their data in real-time using message queues. A Tivoli Workload Scheduler WebSphere MQ job is used to post messages to a request queue and wait for a response in the response queue. It can also publish a message on a topic or on a queue. The advantages are endless: be informed of delays and potential problems, react and recover, monitor the start and finish of jobs, set up checks to monitor when jobs are running unusually longer than expected or completing much earlier than expected, consult the job log to verify the output, and use event-driven workload automation to monitor the size of message queues and trigger a set of actions when one or more specific events take place.

Business scenario

A travel agency needs to reserve a flight, a hotel room, and a rental car.

All of these reservations must be made before the overall business transaction can be considered complete. Every single reservation consists of linked tasks: availability calendars must be checked before booking, and they will need to be updated afterwards to reflect the changed situation.

The whole business process can be automated through the integration of IBM Workload Scheduler with WebSphere MQ. Upon receiving WebSphere MQ messages, IBM Workload Scheduler starts the parallel execution of background reservation tasks. Each task, when completed successfully, sends messages back to WebSphere MQ. Once all the responses have been sent back to WebSphere MQ, the whole business process is complete.