MVMUA (New York City area)

From: http://www2.marist.edu/~mvmua

MVMUA is the oldest organized VM users group in the country. In January 2009 we celebrated our 35th Anniversary at Computer Associates in NYC. January 2004 we celebrated our 30th anniversary, Computer Associates and IBM were CO-Sponsors. January 1999 was our 25th anniversary.

Our purpose is to promote the use of VM, help educate those programmers who run or use VM in their work and to promote communication between these people. VM or 'Virtual Machine' in most cases is a HOST operating system for multiple Guest Operating systems (virtual machines) like VSE, VSE/ESA, z/VSE, MVS, MVS/ESA, OS/390, z/OS, as well as LINUX. We offer education and companionship for users of these operating systems as well.

We cover roughly the metropolitan areas of New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. However, there is no restriction to who can join. We have members from Boston, California and Virginia. The only requirement is that your installation runs VM of some kind or that you are a vendor that writes products for VM. We have about 60 member companies right now. The dues are still only $190 a year.

What do you get for your membership? There are several traditional services that MVMUA has provided for years. In addition, there are new things that we are trying out and hope to continue. The traditional services consist mainly of 4 meetings a year (one each quarter). These presently take place in New York City, at Information Builders Corporate Offices. In Jersey City at the Brown Brothers Office, and Marist College in Poughkeepsie New York. These meetings are one day, normally on a Tuesday or Wednesday. During the meeting there are presentations from a variety of speakers. While the topics are varied, they all deal with some aspect of VM. Now more and more of our sessions are dealing with LINUX on VM as well as running VSE and MVS as a guest of VM. These meetings have been described as "mini-SHARE"s. In many cases, this is the truth. We manage to get many speakers who do the same presentations at SHARE, GUIDE and the IBM VM/Linux Technical Expo/Conference. MVMUA gives you the opportunity to see quality presentations in a more intimate setting and without having to travel too far. We also get regular visits from the VM developers from Endicott. It is an excellent chance for you to give them "one-on-one" feedback and hear about future directions of VM, VSE, TCP/IP, and Linux.

NEW for 2006: MVMUA has joined SHARE; Any of our members can attend a SHARE conference on a members discount. This will allow those people to attend SHARE that otherwise might not be able to.

Some of our more popular speakers include some of our members, such as Arty Ecock of CUNY, Barton Robinson of Velocity Software, Dave Kreuter of VM Resources LTD, Brian Jagos of Computer Associates, David Boyes of Sine Nomine Associates and Martha McConaghy of Marist College.

Member installations can send as many people as they wish to our meetings.

Approximately 1 month to about 2 weeks before the meeting a final agenda and registration information is posted on our WEB site. Each installation has a primary representative and that is who receives the mailings. They agree to pass on the material to whoever is going to attend the meeting. Meeting agendas are also available via e-mail on the MVMUA-L discussion list (MVMUA-L (at) VM.MARIST.EDU) and the IBMVM discussion list (IBMVM (at) LISTSERV.UARK.EDU) The meetings include complimentary coffee and danish in the morning and soda in the afternoon. Lunch is sometimes provided. Perspective members can attend one complimentary meeting to see if they like us and wish to join. To do this, contact our president, Bill Munson. His e-mail is william.munson (at) bbh.com or contact our vice-president, Eric Schuler-Dalverny at Eric_Schuler-Dalverny (at) ibi.com.