Archive for October, 2007

Results of the community experiment

As stated in this post, the chat room was inserted and has been removed.

 I had a total of 3 users using it briefly for a small chat, and 2 spam comments.

Is it worth having, or not ?

Maybe readers can vote in the poll on the site ?

I’ll close the poll at Christmas 2007 and work out whether to persue the idea or not. As part of the reason for this blog (apart from me waxing lyrical about Gen) is to create an “independant community buzz” around Gen, if anyone has ideas about how this can be done – please let me know  – either through commenting on the site, or through a personal contact email, which you can do here:

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EDGEucate 2007 is here!

EDGEucate 2007, October 29-31 is now here !

 The best way to meet the Gen developers (those who actually DEVELOP the product!), Gen developers (those who develop WITH the product) and the customers who use it!

 Best of luck to those people who are good enough to share their experiences with others, and to those who are organising it!

Also,hopefully someone will send me some information and pictures, to share with the Gen community on this site!

About Gentalk.biz

A few people have emailed me to ask about gentalk.biz – so here goes…..

I am a Gen user, and have been for 10+ years, and (most importantly) have no formal connection with CA or any of the companies that I may mention in these pages…. of course I have friends in some of these organisations – the Gen community is reasonably small !

I went to CA World in Las Vegas in 2007, and was inspired to set a up a Gen blog – there didn’t seem to be one – and so gentalk.biz was born (it was previously hosted on gentalk.wordpress.com – a free hosting site for blogs).

Since September 2007, it has been hosted here at gentalk.biz.

The site is funded purely by me, which is why there is a Donation button and I have started selling mugs and so on to get some funding to keep it going.

Most importantly, the site is the result of my own views and experiences of Gen – I will of course promote “EDGE”, and all that it stands for, since I believe that a strength of any software product is its users – EDGE is where its at for a formal user group. I do also welcome discussions in these pages (thanks to everyone who has commented and given me ideas!) which can be seen as “independant” from EDGE, CA and all the other Gen-related organisations around the world.

What I say in these pages is not endorsed by my employer and/or any other organisation – so I can be objective, but would welcome any contributions or news items from any Gen-related organisation – hence the newsfeeds on the site.

The aim of gentalk.biz is to become an informal discussion and comment platform for Gen and its direction, good and bad points etc.

Hope this clears it up – more comments from the community = more content = more community = more comments from the community etc etc !

Last Post from EDGE EMEA 2007

I’ve written a summary document which you can download here which is a collection of the posts on gentalk.biz about the conference, tidied up a little and presented in a PDF file, just to make it easier for readers after the event to get a feel for what happens at EDGE events, and how worthwhile they are.

Knowledgebase of upgrades

I was recently speaking to a colleague of a colleague who was about to undergo a rather large migration – they were (like we have recently done) changing database technology as part of an upgrade to Gen 7.6 from a previous version.

They were interested in what experiences we had encountered when we did a similar upgrade. Of course there are the changes in data formats, different database behaviours and so on.

It became apparent that there is a need for there to be a knowledgebase of upgrades. What I mean is that using a specific function in Gen under (say DB2) on a mainfame (z/OS)  will result in a different set of consideratons or behaviours when running with a different version of Gen on an Oracle database on a Unix platform. I think that this will enable upgrades to be completed easier. Does this sound a good idea ?

I think that what’s required is a matrix covering technology “from”, technology “to” and “function”…….

I’ve not explained this very well, and such a thing may even exist – if it does, can someone point it out to me ?