President's Message By Don Rima

By now, the term "iSeries" is about as common place as the term "AS/400" used to be back in '87. With the changes in names come changes in technologies and required skill sets. I don't need to tell you that you're not very likely to retire with only a RPG skill set on your resume….unless you're 65 already.

Yes, we know that not only is time hard to come by, but employers in many cases are loath to send employees to training to maintain their skill sets. So, to meet these road blocks, we're going to bring as much of what we see as current technology needs to you. Further, we are supporting efforts by Mid Atlantic Midrange to bring in one day seminars that are "Harvard Quality at User Group Prices" by offering our WAM members a discount to all MAM events in 2002. So, watch for future details and mark your calendars accordingly.

In 2002, we're continuing our affiliation and support of the national user's group COMMON. By virtue of your membership in WAM, you may attend the conferences at the membership rate under our affiliational membership, without having to pay the extra membership related fees to attend the conference. We believe that there is continued value in the COMMON experiences.

We're planning the meeting agenda for 2002 and in it working hard to help expose you, our membership, to as much of the needed tools for the upcoming skill set requirements for the next phase of your technology future. We're starting off with a very nice presentation on XML. With XML, the industry is saying that they're further moving from any proprietary presentation methodology and going towards a more common data handling and presentation mechanism.

January 2002 Meeting

1. What is XML
2. XML Code Example vs. HTML
3. Business Uses for XML
4. Business Benefits of XML
5. Technology Uses of XML
6. Real World iSeries and other platform integration with XML examples
7. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
8. Application-to-Application (A2A) Services. Including XML Parser
9. More Real World iSeries and other platform integration with XML
10. Questions & Answers Session