Tuesday

Tuesday is one of my favorite days at SHARE. This is the day that many of the projects present their "What's New?" sessions to describe the latest tools and techniques for their piece of z/OS. Just pick your favorite topics (SDSF, JES, WLM, RACF, etc.) and quickly get brought up to speed. An easy way to find these sessions is to search the proceedings and search for "what's new".

Because of the increase of new people into the mainframe platform, SHARE is also providing many sessions on the basics. At this SHARE, you'll find a 5-session series on the Mainframe Operating System.  To find these sessions, search the proceedings for 'boot camp', '101', 'znextgen', and 'dummies' (although I resent this last title!). There are at least thirty sessions that are great for those new to z/OS.

 

Sunday & Monday

Although Austin's chilly weather didn't seem to be welcoming us, the skies were blue, and it was great to see old friends again. Yes, attendance was down from last year, but we all expected that. The first couple of days are used for most of the project opening sessions, where new features and facilities are described.  z/OS 1.11 was the major topic in the MVS sessions that I attended.  Here are some presentations that provide a lot of information, even if you weren't at the session:

Stephen Branch (IBM) has three "basics" presentations on DFSMS and VSAM that are extremely well done.  Here is the link to all of Stephen's presentations.

Jerry Ng (IBM) presented his twice-yearly list of important APARs that are recommended by Level 2 support in session 2800.  These are always important APARs for you to be aware of.

If you're interested in what's coming in z/OS 1.11 (September 2009), see session 2873 by John Eells (IBM).

For other sessions (or if these links don't work for you), go to www.share.org and click on 'Proceedings' at the left.

Welcome to my experiment

As any subscribers to Cheryl Watson's Tuning Letter or Cheryl's List are aware, I'm a big fan of SHARE, a twice-yearly conference organized for mainframe customers of IBM.  SHARE is one of my favorite places to keep up to date on what's happening with z/OS. 

At this SHARE in Austin (March 1-6), I'll update this blog as I see or hear things that are especially timely.  This isn't a promise but just an experiment, because I'm not sure that I'll have time to keep it going all week.

If you're at SHARE and you see me, please stop and say hello.  I'll be attending the EWCP (Enterprise Wide Capacity & Planning) project sessions and MVS project sessions.  I'm also speaking at:

Session 3117 - What Does a Capacity & Performance Specialist Do Anyway?, Wednesday, 1:30pm.

Session 2509 - Cheryl's Hot Flashes #21, Friday, 9:30 am.

And I'll be on a panel at:

Sessions 2549 - Meet the Experts: WLM, Performance and Capacity Planning Topics, Thursday, 4:30 pm.