COMMON 2012 Annual Meeting and Exposition

This week is the COMMON 2012 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Anaheim, CA. It's been a busy week of giving presentations, talking with clients during the exposition hours, attending evening social events, and general discussion among peers passionate about IBM i. I spent an hour at the IBM Systems Magazine booth where they were advertising their bloggers with pictures of heads on a stick – so Minnesotan in California!

Here are a few observations from this week: 

• The overall mood about i seems to be positive. This is a very subjective statement, but the people I talked to weren't bemoaning marketing nor were they voicing concerns about i going away. Rather, they talked about their positive experiences with solutions on i and most questions I got were about solving technical problems. I talked to a couple people that hadn't been to COMMON in 10 years, but they were back this year.
• When I give a presentation, I generally ask for a show of hands to see what releases are installed. My highly unscientific results show that the majority are now on 6.1 or 7.1. There are still some shops on 5.4, but the majority have moved forward
• Several people found out about improving IFS save times by using async bring from the blog, Achieve Faster IFS Save Times Using SAV With ASYNCBRING, written early this year and were thrilled with the results that enhancement provided. It's really great to hear about how information written in this blog has helped people solve problems they were dealing with.
• In fact, there was a discussion at the IBM i Q&A session about IBM's documentation on new features. Because IBM has delivered so much new function over the past couple years via PTFs, it's not always easy to find the documentation. This blog has been one way we're trying to communicate the new features and that will continue to be the case. The IBM i developerWorks site is also an important location for documentation on recent enhancements.
• DisneyLand is amazingly clean. I have never seen such clean concrete!
• Disney's attention to detail is impressive. In the hotel room you will find Micky Mouse gloved-hands that serve as light-fixture holders, Micky ears on the sink and shower faucet handles, a Micky glove with a pointing finger on the shower faucet to show which way to turn on the water instead of the usual red arrow, mirrors that are shaped like ones you might see in the animated movies, night-lights in the formation of fireworks. The music from the bed-side lamp was a bit too much for me though!

I always enjoy attending the COMMON conferences and it's been a great way to meet others with passion about IBM i.

I do want to share two additional things this week....

COMMON has published their call for presentations for the 2012 Fall Conference and Expo. New speakers are always encouraged, so if you have expertise you'd like to share, submit your session idea. The deadline for submissions is June 4^th.

Finally, COMMON Europe is coming up in early June. I'll be traveling to Vienna to do some presentations there and will also attend the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) meeting. This is the 50th anniversary of COMMON Europe.

 

 

 

Fall Conferences

I was in St. Petersburg, FL this past week for the Fall COMMON Conference. It's a small conference compared to the spring event, but I find these small conferences very enjoyable. The agenda has a little of bit of everything, so while the breadth of sessions may not match the much larger spring conference, there is still an excellent set of topics that are covered. One of the things I like best about the smaller conferences is that the attendees seem more relaxed – there often is more dialog and discussion with a small audience than with a larger one.

Next week is the Power Systems Technical University in Miami; I won't be attending that conference but others from IBM will be there. The last week in October has the Power Systems Technical University in Copenhagen, and I will be there, covering the performance topics that I usually talk about. In addition, I'll be doing a couple general IBM i sessions. Having never been to Copenhagen before, I'm looking forward to that trip!

If you would have told me 20 years ago that I would be out speaking and writing a blog, I would have scoffed at the thought; I was a software developer more comfortable with the confines of my office than sharing things I knew with a larger audience. But I decided to give speaking a try – I remember how nervous I was at first! But the feedback was always positive and the attendees were appreciative of the information, which kept me coming back, and as with all things, we get better with practice and experience. I'll keep on practicing...

With that thought – if you have areas of expertise that you think others would find valuable, submit your ideas for the COMMON Spring 2012 conference. The education team is always looking for new content to add to the agenda and new speakers to participate in the conference.  The call for presentations was sent out this just week and now is the time to bring your ideas forward.

 

 

 

COMMON, the Minneapolis Advantage

With the COMMON conference being held in Minneapolis this year, there were a few unique opportunities that made this conference a little special that I thought would be nice to share with the larger i community.

The temperatures were very chilly early this week, unusually cold for early May, with even some snow flurries in the air – definitely not the special part of the week. I'm sure that made some of the attendees from warmer climates wonder why anyone would want live in Minnesota anyway!? Everyone was appreciative of the skyway system in Minneapolis to avoid braving the cold May temperatures. (OK, maybe not everyone, but this native Minnesotan sure was!)

COMMON and IBM worked together to provide the ability for people from IBM Rochester to attend COMMON for one day. Because most of the IBM i development team in Rochester is unable to attend COMMON, this gave them the opportunity to see what the conference is all about, attend a few sessions, the Expo, and the evening events. It also gave them the chance to “get out” and speak to some of our clients. I talked to some of the Rochester developers who rarely get this kind of an opportunity, and the feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive. They heard about interesting businesses, small businesses, facets of what customers really like about IBM i and Rochester (our support!), and many other things.

Likewise, I know many COMMON attendees appreciated the ability to talk to members of the development team. It also gave IBM the ability to provide a wide range of expertise in the IBM Power Bar in the expo, as well as giving additional people the opportunity to present technical sessions.

COMMON also offered tours of the IBM Rochester facility. Since my day job at IBM is working in the Performance and Scalability Services Center, which used to be known as the Rochester Benchmark Center, I rode the bus down to Rochester with those signed up to take to tour so I could lead the tour of our test facility. The excitement of our clients to see the Rochester facility is wonderful. The IBM Rochester Wiki page has some interesting information about the architecture of the big blue buildings.

And finally, the call for presentations for the fall COMMON conference is now out. The following information was in the COMMON Daily on Tuesday and Wednesday:

The call for presentations for 2011 Fall Conference and Expo is now open. The conference will take place October 3-5 at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront, St. Petersburg, Florida. The education team is looking for sessions and all day workshops in every course of study. We are particularly interested in sessions on New Technology and RPG.

Current speakers should visit their speaker portal to submit sessions.  But any member can submit a new session by following this link.

The COMMON Education team is always looking for new content to add to the conference agenda and for new speakers. I'd also like to reiterate what I wrote last week about volunteers – there are several open positions on the Education team, and if you'd like to get involved and help to shape the agenda for future conferences, consider volunteering.


Twitter: #ibmi @DawnMayiCan #COMMONUG, #ibmiuser

COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting

The COMMON 2011 Annual Meeting was underway yesterday. It's always exciting to be part of the conference – both behind the scenes and as a speaker.

My day started off with a breakfast meeting for the members of the education team. Behind the scenes, I'm the IBM liaison to COMMON for the conference agenda-planning work. The education team consists of subject matter experts (SMEs) from many technical areas within and outside IBM. The education team works throughout the year planning the Spring Annual Meeting and the Fall Conference.

COMMON relies on volunteers for many roles, of which the education team is one. COMMON has many volunteer opportunities if you’d like to get involved in helping with the conference.

The opening session was very well attended and was one of the best opening sessions I can remember. Tom Rosamilia, general manager of Power and z Systems gave an update on Power systems. You probably had already heard that IBM sold of out Power7 720 and 740 models in the fourth quarter of last year.  ou probably also know that it’s IBM i that drives the sales of the low-end Power systems models.

Eric Brown, who worked on Watson, gave a presentation that went into more detail in the development of the natural language-processing software and explained the challenges of developing software to understand natural language. It was a very interesting presentation; everyone I talked to after the session found it fascinating.

If you weren’t able to attend COMMON, the opening session was streamed live, and remains available from the COMMON website.

After the opening session was the expo and then the “Ask the Experts” events. These were pretty typical events compared to other years. However, one thing stands out--I had several people tell me how much they enjoy reading this blog and the content it covers, and someone even said, “Hey, you're that blogging lady!”  Feedback is always appreciated, as is input.  As COMMON attendees are getting plenty of education this week, if there are topics that you’d like to see me write about, you can comment to this blog or send me an email.


Twitter: #ibmi @DawnMayiCan #COMMONUG, #ibmiuser