COMMON Workshops 'Focus' on Hot Topics

Published: July 9, 2007

by Dan Burger

When the COMMON user group revised its delivery of educational programs, COMMON Focus, a workshop-based, three-day event, was created to replace the second of two full-scale conferences that had been the traditional format for decades. FOCUS 2007 will test whether a smaller, more focused educational format is a better fit for System i professionals who are tight on time and money. To be conveniently located, the organization chose Columbus, Ohio, which is situated within 550 miles of half the population of the United States.

The event agenda for FOCUS 2007 is built around 15 workshops that combine lecture and lab presentations on areas such as modernizing RPG applications, implementing i5/OS security, working within the WebSphere development environment, developing Web applications with PHP, planning and deploying a disaster recovery strategy, development and administration of SQL, and additional training options that COMMON's Strategic Education Team has determined to be in demand. For a complete listing of workshops, follow this link. Each one-day workshop consists of numerous sessions and attendees are required to attend one workshop per day (that's the focus in FOCUS 2007), as opposed to hopping from session to session regardless to content specificity as is the norm with the annual COMMON Conference that is now held each spring. The next COMMON Conference, by the way, is scheduled for March 30 through April 3, 2008, in Nashville, Tennessee.

FOCUS 2007 will include a vendor exhibition. The vendor area will be used for the welcome reception on Sunday evening and for breaks between sessions during Monday and Tuesday or the three-day event. Attendees have an opportunity to learn about products and services from the independent software vendor community as well a central location for one-on-one interactions with session speakers and other attendees. In case you were wondering, breakfast and lunch will be provided each day.

Headquarters for the event will be the Hyatt Regency Columbus and room rates are $150 per night for single or double occupancy. Registration fees for FOCUS 2007 are $1420 before September 20 and $1,570 after that date. Those fees apply to COMMON members. Those who are not members of the user group will be charged $1,720 prior to September 20 and $1,870 thereafter.

COMMON is the world's largest user group of for the midrange community. The organization comprises more than 4,000 individual and corporate members and represents more than 22,000 IT professionals.

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