User Groups Remain Vital

Last week we were speaking at the annual OMNI User Group event in Chicago. In common with other groups around the country OMNI is experimenting with different locations and styles of events in order to help lower their prices and (hopefully) attract more attendees. This year the event was held at the IBM facility in Schaumburg, a very different location from the more usual hotel or convention center. Judging from the attendance though it seems to have worked. We understand attendance was higher than in previous years and our sessions were all very well attended. We were also delighted to see that IBM i's chief architect Steve Will attracted a good crowd for his keynote session at the end of the day.

As usual Steve did a great job, and the IBM i success stories he relayed were heartening to the faithful. One rather sad note in his presentation was his comment as to how hard it is to get companies to agree to allow IBM to use their names. Not just as references, but at all! Why? Because IBM i is their competitive advantage. They know their competitors are wasting millions of dollars trying to get other systems up to the level of capability, reliability and affordability IBM i offers them. Why on earth would they want to share that information with them?

On the Subject of User Groups

Tomorrow (Wednesday 26th), we are partnering with the good folks at TUG in Toronto to offer a one-day mini-Summit event. Two tracks of RPG-oriented sessions will be coupled with a lunch time "chat" with the RPG compiler's lead architect Barbara Morris. TUG has always been at the forefront of providing innovative educational offerings to members. The group already offers low-cost night school classes to help members bring their skills up to date. This is the latest and it looks from the number of people registered as if it will be successful and hopefully the first of many.

OMNI and TUG are just two examples of vibrant local IBM i user groups. They are certainly not alone. This year we've already worked with WMCPA, the Wisconsin area group, NEUGC, the northeast user group consortium, OCEAN user group in southern California and AMCU in Atlanta, as well as the Fort Wayne user group.  Sadly, we have also heard of local user groups that continue to struggle to stay afloat and some that have lost the struggle.

Local user groups can be a valuable way to keep abreast of both local business trends as well as IBM i technical information and networking with IBM i peers. Online resources are great but can never replace the face-to-face interaction with fellow i fans.

We've said it before and hate to sound like a broken record. But if you don't participate in your local user group, you should. If they aren't offering the kinds of topics or activities you need, contact them and tell them what you need. And if you don't have a local user group in your area, maybe it's time to start one. There are people who can help. You could begin by starting a conversation on the subject here on our blog or on the InterLUG mailing list run by David Gibbs.

Trying to Get a Life

We're writing this in New York's La Guardia airport waiting for our connecting flight to Atlanta. Actually, Atlanta is not the final destination as in a couple of days we will be moving on to Costa Mesa for the OCEAN User Group's Annual Conference. OCEAN is a great group and works really hard to put on this event every year.

Like many user groups around the world, OCEAN struggles these days to attract volunteers. People sign up for positions thinking that it would be nice to "help out" for a year or two, only to find that nobody comes forward to replace them. So they stay in the job longer than they had intended--a situation which does not go unnoticed by their potential replacements. It seems to be a self-perpetuating situation. People can't roll off the job because there's nobody to replace them, and potential replacements won't come forward because they're afraid they will get trapped!

Perhaps it is all tied up in the whole life-work balance thing. While we wouldn't argue that cell phones and other portable devices add a lot to our lives, they also seem to make it impossible to get away from work. Case in point. When we speak at a conference it is not uncommon for at least one member of the audience to be texting away (or even answering the phone which is frankly rude and _really__ annoying) and they will then often end up pulling out a laptop and proceed to sign on to their system to sort out what we assume is the "crisis de jour." It didn't used to be that way. Most folks when away from the office would perhaps call in at lunchtime to see what was going on, but that was about it. The office survived. In all probability nobody died. So what is so all-fired important that today we can't even seem to escape the clutches for more than an hour or two? It is hard to believe that our efforts are really that much more critical to the well being of the business than they were say five or six years ago. What's the big difference?

In part this thinking comes about because following OCEAN we had decided to take a week's vacation on the California coast and rented a beachfront apartment. We began to realize though how screwed up our work-life priorities have become when we found ourselves listing high-speed internet as a "must have" for any potential vacation home. Now we can always make the excuse that since we run our own business it's important for us to stay in touch with our clients. As it happens, we also discovered that three of our ongoing projects have deadlines rapidly approaching and that we are going to have little choice but to work during at least part of our vacation - but at least we'll be able to do so with a view of the ocean!

Our friend Trevor Perry often delivers a session called "Get a Life" where he encourages people to find their passion and to get their work-life balance in order. Perhaps we need to attend the session again and take more notes this time! In the meantime perhaps you could share your own secrets. In the face of the growing pressures of an ever-connected world, how do you find time for a life?

Looking Forward to Saying 'Yes' in 2012

We've said it before and we'll say it again--the current economic climate is presenting many IBM i shops with the perfect opportunity to prove their worth and make sure the IBM i (and they) are around for the future. A lot of the more ambitious (and often futile) major software changes are on hold. In other cases (and we learned of another such example today) the financial climate is making companies take a long hard look at the true economic realities of the "miracle" software that they have been struggling to implement. The result of such reality checks is invariably a realization that the new system has racked up at least twice the originally projected cost, uses far more hardware and manpower than promised, and often under performs. Pity that it took an economic disaster to make people realize what many of us could have told them before they started!

One successful tactic that an increasing number of shops are trying involves having your IT department act as a vendor. If you know that software/hardware package XYZ is under consideration, ask to be considered a vendor. Put together a bid and ask for it to be considered as an alternative. Even if you factor in the costs of a major rewrite of your existing applications, add the cost of learning new skills, and add in a few experienced contractors to help mentor the team and bring them up to speed on the "new stuff" we'll lay you odds that you will still come up with a budget that is less than 50 percent of package XYZ. You'll also find that you can set a project time-line that is significantly shorter than that for XYZ, and will offer greater customization for the users. You can do it. It works. After all, who knows your business better than you?

In other shops, we're seeing smaller projects emerge where IBM i developers seize the opportunity to show off "what i can do" that impresses their user communities. You may be surprised how much impact you can have by trying your hand at small modernization projects, such as producing browser interfaces to what were spooled file reports (many ways to do this, most requiring minimal modifications to existing RPG report programs) or providing an easy Web service via XMLSERVICE.

On the subject of modernization, Jon did a lunchtime seminar for the Atlanta User Group (amcu.org) today titled "Modernizing Your Applications--For Free" where he focussed on many of the free tools that we have mentioned here and in our columns for IBM i EXTRA. It was a good crowd--bigger than they've had in a while apparently--and the subject fit in well with their theme for this year's education series, which is modernization.

Jon challenged his audience at AMCU today to "just say yes" when requests come in for "out of the ordinary" application functions. Say yes and worry about how implementation. If you say no or even if you say, "Let me get back to you on that after studying the options," before you know it, someone in the Windows group will have jumped on the project or the users will have found a packaged "solution". As a result, you may well end up spending more time in the long run wrestling with integrating what they did than it would have taken to implement the project on i to begin with.

AMCU is also planning to cooperate with other user groups that are working to update their members' skills. One such group, SEMIUG (the Southeast Michigan iSeries User Group), is currently working on a collaborative project aimed at teaching members new skills while helping to demonstrate the viability on the IBM i as a modern platform. In fact SEMIUG's meeting tonight is dedicated to a progress report and anyone can join the webcast and see what they are up to. See here for details.

We applaud efforts like this and intend to work with these groups whenever possible.

Musing on Comments, Updates and Travel

Some days, ideas for this blog seem to flow like water ... and then there are the days like today.

What to talk about? Well, for openers a quick thank you to Mihael Schmidt and Aaron Bartell for pointing out some of the tools we missed in our recent review of the world of RPG-oriented Open Source software which appeared in last month's EXTRA. If you don't subscribe to EXTRA (and you should!) you can find the original article here  and Mihael and Aaron's comments here. Thanks, guys. We won't elaborate on why these particular gems were omitted from the original list as we've already done our groveling in the comments section mentioned above. 

One comment we haven't yet responded to, until now, was from IBM's Nadir Amra. Nadir pointed out that our comments on IBM's offering, in the area of consuming Web services in RPG, was somewhat disparaging. And, more to the point, that we had apparently missed out on some recent updates that meant that RPG stubs are now generated to make the interface simpler. Guilty as charged. We had completely missed that change, Nadir, and thanks for pointing it out to us. Since the C compiler is still needed though we are however going withhold judgement on the utility of the revised version until we've had time to give it a test drive. We'll report back here, or in EXTRA, when we have had a chance to do that.

The fact that we were completely unaware of this particular update though does highlight an issue that we've encountered a number of times recently -- unknown IBM i enhancements. Maybe the details of this upgrade were published somewhere but we were completely unaware of them -- and we'd known for a while that some changes were in the offing. Yet we still missed them when they happened. If you know of a reliable source for information on these kinds of "between releases" updates please let us know -- 'cos we obviously aren't catching them all.

As we write this, we're in sunny Livonia, MI. Or at least it was sunny when we arrived -- it's dark right now. We're here for the annual MITEC conference and are looking forward to meeting the faithful at tomorrow's gathering of the clans. Our System i Developer colleague Paul Tuohy is here as well so we'll get the chance to catch up on the latest news from his time at COMMON Europe in Milan a couple of weeks ago. If you're at the conference please come up and say "Hi" -- we always enjoy meeting our readers in person. This is always a great event and it makes a nice change to be able to drive to a conference for once. For us, it's a four-and-a-half-hour drive -- longer than we'd normally take but no longer than flying. Wel,l the actual flight is only 30-40 minutes, but when you factor in the drive to/from the airport and all the extra time you have to spend in security screening, etc., it actually turns out to be as fast to drive. 

On that subject, we don't know how many of you regularly cross the Canada/U.S. border as we do (or for that matter the U.S./Mexico border) but it always strikes us as strange that you get a much more intensive "grilling" when flying cross border -- with limited luggage -- than you do when driving across with a whole car load of stuff. Guess they have their reasons -- but it does seem odd.

Until next week, go forth and do good things.

User Groups and Education

A big shout out to our friends and IBM i comrades who are gathered this week in Minneapolis for the COMMON annual meeting, which is still the largest collection of the i faithful we know. Sounds like good things are happening in Minneapolis.

One especially good thing is that our friend and very deserving candidate, Mike Pavlak from Zend, was awarded the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship. This award was instituted to honor the individual who exemplifies Al’s commitment and dedication to the i community. With the work Mike has done to raise interest in IBM i among the PHP community, Mike certainly fits the bill. A great choice!

While we’re missing the gathering in Minneapolis, we’re happy to have had the opportunity to meet with many of our i friends a bit closer to home this past week. We participated in our local Toronto User Group conference, TUG TEC. Longtime TUG president and tireless worker in support of TUG, Leo Lefebvre, and his team of volunteers pulled off another successful event this year.

For the second year now, TUG has held their annual conference event at a school in the area: Seneca College campus of York University. We know the OCEAN user group in California has also held some of their recent conference events at a technical school. The annual MITEC event in Michigan (coming up on June 7, BTW) has also been using a local technical school facility for a couple of years. Leaders from these groups tell us the financial incentives to use that type of venue are tremendous.
 
Hotels--the traditional venue for conferences--often charge outrageous fees for use of the facilities and/or for any food and beverage utilized by the event. Since hotels also forbid groups from bringing in their own food and beverages, the result is organizations like local user groups operating on a shoestring budget sometimes find that it just doesn’t make financial sense to even hold a big annual event.

Have other user groups found using a local technical school facility helps the financial picture? Perhaps more local groups could offer larger events if they could find schools in the area that rent out the facilities. Let us know in the comments if you have any experience with that, good or bad. Maybe other groups can learn from the experiences of these trailblazers.

Speaking of local user groups, we’re headed to Dallas next week for an all-day event hosted by local user group MMSA (Metro Midrange Systems Association) on Friday, May 13. If you’re in the Dallas area, check it out. The local user group is offering this full-day event to their members free of charge! Since membership in the group is also reasonable, this may make for a good time to join the group.

One last thought on education. Most often when we attend an event, we’re speaking so much that we rarely have time to attend any sessions to enhance our own skills. That’s why we’re really looking forward to the DB2 for i Directions event coming up in June just outside of Boston. We’re among the hosts for the event, but luckily for us, we’re not on the bill at all for once; we’re going to learn from the IBM Rochester experts about all those things related to DB2 and SQL we’ve missed out on while focusing so much on RPG, PHP and RSE. This will be our chance to get caught up on the latest in SQL performance tools and techniques, XML support in DB2, etc. If you have also been neglecting your SQL skills, you may want to check out this brand new event focussed exclusively on DB2 for i.

An Update From the Road

Thanks to those who wrote agreeing with us that there's nothing as good as teaching others to cement your own understanding. To Dan: keep working at it; yo'd be amazed at how often we discover a better way to do things when our own "pet" method is challenged by a student. To be honest, we wondered how that post would be received in the light of a discussion that has been going on in one of the PHP groups at LinkedIn. The thread is entitled "Should you teach your co-workers your skill-set?" and we found the responses of some members rather disturbing. Talk about being protective of one's skills! Glad to see that i folks don't seem to think that way. It was particularly surprising considering how much sharing normally occurs in the PHP world.

Right now we're in Manchester, UK, for the Powershift conference, and have just heard some good news. They've just announced that NiSUG (Northern i Series User group) has joined COMMON Europe as the UK representative and will now be known as the National i Series User Group. Good to see that COMMON will once again be represented in the UK. The group has formed many strong alliances within the UK over the years and this can only be seen as good news for friends of the i.

While on the subject of the UK: you don't have to be here long to realize how lucky we are in North America in terms of the cost of Internet access. Six pounds to connect from the hotel for 90 minutes. That's about US $10. Free Internet in hotels hasn't caught on here, except in some of the very inexpensive hotels along the freeway, although we do see it increasingly in restaurants and pubs, so hotels can't be far behind. Luckily, compared with North America, 3G data plans for phones and USB sticks are much more reasonable. Two pounds for unlimited use for a day is a far better deal than the hotel connections.

Once we leave here we're headed for France ... maybe. The protests in France over the government proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 (yes, 62!) are threatening to derail our plans. Literally, since we're due to travel to France by train!

Once more thing before we go. We noticed last week Asna became the latest company to announce support for Open Access for RPG. Wings is the name of the new product and since Ansa is here at the conference we hope to have a chance to see what it offers. Welcome to the club, Asna!

One Step Forward, One Step Back ...

The last few weeks we've been busy with on-site training classes and user group events all while in the final stages of preparing for our RPG & DB2 Summit in Minneapolis. Once the dust settles on that event we're headed off to Manchester, UK for the one-day PowerShift event, followed by the two-day RPG & DB2 Summit France in Paris. We're looking forward to meeting some of our European readers during these events. If you're there, then please say hi--or bonjour, if you prefer!

The reason for mentioning this is as far as IBM i educational events go, the market seems to be all over the place at the moment. Some events are being canceled, others are suffering significantly reduced attendance, while others (and we're thankful to say our own "Summit" is in this category) are running at close to pre-recession levels. We've also heard this week's COMMON event in San Antonio has exceeded attendance expectations. Is it a question of the market being more value sensitive?  A regional issue? Who knows. But it certainly makes it much riskier to plan such events now than it was in the past.

Witness the situation with one of the local user group events we spoke at recently. While talking with some of the organizers we heard what's sadly an all-too-familiar story. The attendance at the event wasn't what they had hoped, and the hard-working organizers were baffled by the lack of participation. The problem was they weren't sure whether the problem was the agenda; did it included the topics the membership needed? Or the price? Or the state of the local economy? Or ... It wasn't because they didn't care about what the members needed; it's quite the opposite. It seems they'd tried numerous attempts to solicit input on the members' needs via e-mails and surveys, but had received very little in the way of input.

This isn't a situation unique to this particular local user group. We've heard similar stories from around the country and the world. Organizers often ask for our ideas on popular topics and how to get input from their community. It's hard to know what to do if people don't communicate with you. If you're a member of a local IBM i user group, have you told the organizers what your interests are? Maybe you're thinking, "My local group hasn't offered anything useful to me in ages, so why should I bother communicating with them?" Perhaps the reason they don't offer anything useful to you is because they have no idea what you need. Local user-group leaders are no better at reading minds than the rest of us. Most of the time, they're doing the best they can with the information they have. Unfortunately, all too often, they have precious little information with which to work.

Perhaps you think your suggestions won't be welcomed by the group's organizers. While your mileage may vary, we've found far more groups who are desperate for input from the membership than we have those who prefer to work to their own personal preferences. Some local user groups still seem to be going strong and the members enthusiastically participate and provide input. If you're part of one of those groups, maybe you could help us help other groups by sharing your ideas on how to best solicit information from the membership.

Or is the problem that the day of the user group is simply over, supplanted by the Internet? We don't feel that's the case. The Internet can certainly provide technical information, but can it provide the interpersonal interaction we've always found to be so important in networking with fellow IBM i enthusiasts?

We'd like to hear your thoughts.

Adapting for the Future

We just returned from speaking at the Ocean User Group's annual conference and were delighted to see an increase in the level of attendance. We suspect that in part this was due to the remarkably low price level that the group was able to achieve. And just how did they manage to do that in these days of ever-increasing prices? Well, like the Toronto User Group (TUG) we covered in May of this year, they switched from hosting the event at a hotel to using the facilities at a school, as did the MITEC group we mentioned in June. This seems to be a good trend.

In Ocean's case the school in question was a campus of National University. Because the majority of their classes are held in the evenings and on weekends, the Ocean folks were able to rent the facilities during the day at a very competitive rate. As an added bonus, they weren't tied to paying inflated hotel prices for meals and refreshments and were free to arrange their own catering. This resulted in better quality food at a lower cost. A win-win situation. Those of you who've never tried to organize an event at a hotel may wonder just how much of a difference something like this can make. Just to give you some indication--it isn't uncommon for a hotel to charge $50 or more plus an 18- to 20-percent service charge, for a gallon of coffee. That's close to double the cost of buying from Starbucks or other quality coffee establishments. Use similar figures for meals and snacks and you'll quickly see why it makes such a huge difference.

The Ocean team is a great crowd and continue to work hard to make the group both meaningful and affordable for their members, as indeed do all of the local User Groups we've had the pleasure of working with lately.

And the future is ...

We finally gave in. Well, kind of. Remember back in December of 2009 we mentioned an eBook reader was on our shopping list and we were waiting to see what happened to pricing. Well, the price point has finally dropped to a level where we felt we really should take the plunge. Of course, the number of devices in the market has increased significantly since we last looked, so we had to start the shopping all over again. In the end, although the price of the Sony reader we mentioned previously as our leading candidate has fallen by close to 50 percent, that was not our final choice. We went for the Kobo and so far are very happy with our choice. It interfaces with both Jon's Mac and Susan's Windows PC, and can handle PDFs as well as the major ebook formats. In Canada it's sold through the Chapters book-store chain and Walmart, and in the U.S. by Barnes and Noble, which is where we bought ours as they're running a $20 bonus promotion right now and were also offering five free eBooks. The eBooks work really well and PDFs are more challenging to use, but since most times we have our laptops with us that's a minor requirement. Jon has now read the whole of a Lee Child novel, a substantial portion of two Sitepoint technical books and various other bits and pieces and most of this on the unit's first battery charge.

It's not an iPad, but we long ago decided to wait until at least version two before we launched into buying one of those, so for now the Kobo will fit the bill. In fact, we may end up with two of them since Jon is showing no sign of wanting to "play nice and share."