KICKS is not CICS

KICKS is an enhancement for CMS & TSO that lets you run your CICS applications directly instead of having to 'install' those apps in CICS. You don't even need CICS itself installed on your mainframe system.

KICKS is free, and is a close copy of the IBM CICS transaction processing system. See this link,  but the usage is like an very old CICS system. For those in the know, no CEDA or CEMT, all is done by tables and compiled versions of them.

KICKS runs as any application under TSO, but can be used as multiuser!

KICKS provides a high level of source code compatibility with CICS so you can move an application either way between CICS and KICKS simply by recompiling. Whether for ease of testing, fast deployment to small groups of your users, or simple "guerrilla marketing", join your colleagues using KICKS to speed up their development.

Being TSO/CMS based, KICKS can't support the many thousands of users a multi-user system like CICS can. But if KICKS can't support thousands of users, it can certainly support a few hundred of your users, and if having separate address spaces means it can't run as many users it also means your users aren't so tied to each other's fates - one crash does not kill all. This reduced consequence of failure often means your new application's "Time to Market" can be dramatically shortened.

Like CICS, KICKS supports file sharing among its users. Hundreds of TSO or CMS users share db2 tables or VSAM files with no more concern about doing so than CICS users - and since KICKS VSAM support is also available in batch there's usually no need to "close" KICKS VSAM files just so such batch jobs can access them.

Unlike CICS, KICKS requires no special systems or security services and can be easily installed and used by a single applications programmer with a TSO or CMS account.

You can find KICKS here to download, user guide here,  and installing is in this video:

Installing is not difficult, but needs some knowledge of MVS system, what you can find on the Moshix channel on youtube. Of course you can google yourself, but the videos are highly recommended to start learning the system. We will take a look later on this, but for now we study KICKS, the free CICS replacement.