Cheryl's Link
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- October 26, 1998
- About SHARE - describes the purpose of SHARE and membership requirements (the company must own, rent, lease, or exercise control and management of a computing environment consisting of an IBM operating system and/or IBM computing system). Don't bypass the Organization Structure which contains the descriptions of the SHARE clusters (subgroups with similar interests, such as MVS, Data Systems, or Networking), and projects within the clusters. Each project provides its own Web page to describe the purpose of the project and provide links to the project officers. Unfortunately, some of these projects haven't been updated in two years and several of the email addresses are invalid. Hopefully this will change. I would be suspicious of any email id at IBMMAIL.COM or VNET.IBM.COM (most IBMers have now changed to US.IBM.COM). In the MVS Cluster, you can find the page for the group I'm most active in, the Enterprise-wide Capacity and Performance (EWCP) project, and the page to the MVS SCP (base MVS) project, which has a good set of vendor Y2K links. In the Data Systems Cluster, the CICS project has one of the most comprehensive Web pages (thanks to Barry Brooks of University of Florida), including papers and an excellent set of links to other CICS sites. One of the items they provide is a signup form for a free electronic CICS newsletter from Bob Yelavich ("Follow the Yelavich Road"). After you sign up, Bob will send you a set of the previous newsletters. I found them quite valuable. In the Networking cluster, the TCP/IP project has a good set of links to TCP/IP sites.
- Conferences - this page has pointers to future or previous SHARE conferences. For the next conference in San Francisco (February 21-26, 1999), you can get registration information, and the agenda will soon be posted of the 800 sessions to be presented during the week. The typical SHARE conference day is a full one, with sessions from 8 in the morning to 8 (or later) at night. It covers a very full range of topics (OS/390, parallel sysplex, LE, COBOL, Windows NT, Web server, Java, storage management, and much more). You'll also find many tutorials, hands-on labs, full-day sessions (on Sunday), and a 3-day "Technology Exchange" with over 50 vendor booths. To see what a typical conference contains, check out the Previous Technical Conference where you'll see the agenda and abstracts for the last conference. If I could only take one week of training a year, this is what I'd pick!
- Membership - shows you how to sign up ($250 one-time registration for a company). One of the items on this page is 'Members of SHARE' where you can find out if your company is already a member. SHARE has corporate memberships, but not individual memberships.
- Pubs & Software - this section provides a signup for the SHARE publications, such as the CD-ROM of Proceedings (all presentations, some with full papers). They even give you some samples, such as CICS/ESA Performance for Systems Programmers by Bob Archambeault, OS/390 V2R5 by Greg Daynes, and An Introduction to NT Concepts by John Wagner. The proceedings are available for $30 (member; or $45 for non-member).
- Members Only - this section is only available if you know your organization's site id and password, which was sent to the designated employee in your corporation. If you can't locate your SHARE rep, send an email to SHARE. The id and password are meant to be distributed within your organization. The main value of this section (and I think, the whole SHARE site) is the hundreds of free programs and tools from the Technical Information Exchange, including the CBT files. The search ability will search all of the software files, and you can view the results by date, category, author, or title. As an example, I was able to find eight sample IEFACTRT routines and over 30 different files with SMF reporting, including one entire set of EDP Audit Tools. There is also a discussion group. It's small, only about 5-10 entries a month, but you'll find some interesting Q&As.
SHARE is a non-profit organizaton for users of IBM hardware and software. It's one of the oldest and largest user groups with over 2000 member installations. I'm a strong promoter of SHARE because of their valuable winter and summer user conferences. I think the conferences provide the best training available. When I decided to cut back on my travelling, SHARE conferences were the only conferences I kept on my schedule.
The SHARE home page has pointers to the primary sections of the site. Let me point out some things in each area, some of which you might miss without a careful exploration: