This year’s Summer SHARE conference will once again be held as a virtual event. Access to pre-recorded ‘on-demand’ sessions was provided to registered ‘attendees’ starting last Monday (August 2nd), with the live sessions starting next Monday (August 9th).  You can find the impressive list of on-demand sessions here.  And the Technical Agenda is available here.  You do not have to be a registered attendee to view the agenda, however you will need to be registered to download the session recordings.  The SHARE website has changed completely since the last conference, so we highly recommend viewing the Watch the Attendee Orientation video and the SHARE Virtual Experience Networking Platform Demo Video.  It will take less than half an hour to view both videos, and will ensure that you get the maximum value from the conference.

Attendees should note that recordings of the sessions will only be available until the end of August (3 short weeks away), unless you opted in to share your contact information with SHARE’s partner companies, in which case they will be accessible until the end of December.  Once again, the recordings are only available online – sadly you cannot download them for future viewing.

With the recent formal announcement of z/OS 2.5, we are expecting a very interesting week of sessions, with lots of interesting new capabilities to delve into.  We also noticed a lot of Zowe sessions – open source IS coming to your z/OS (in fact, a lot of it is already there!), so you should definitely listen in on some of the Zowe sessions, depending on your level of experience with it.

Naturally, Watson & Walker will be both attending and presenting.  Like most attendees, we feel that we get a lot more value from the traditional in-person conferences, but the virtual event still provides access to invaluable information and experience, especially following the announcement of the new  z/OS release. Mario and I will be presenting our popular Watson & Walker zRoadshow session, but note that, in a major break with tradition, our session will be on Thursday (August 12th) rather than Friday.  Refer to the Technical Agenda page of the website to get the session time in your local timezone.

We hope to ‘see’ you there.

Frank