Apple community grows Unix alternative

 This was the month that Apple left its community to accomplish the work. At this year's MacWorld Apple talked very little about its hardware and operating environment. For a conference that VP Philip Schiller said was "all about the Mac," not much was revealed about hardware or the operating environment, those things that make up the heart and soul of a computer. The news at this annual show from the vendor revolved around software suites called iLife and iWork, as well as the cost of music and a new laptop. It was the first MacWorld without a Steve Jobs address in 10 years, and the lack of dazzle could be felt and found all through the halls and the media reports.

But just because the vendor here is focused on other business opportunity doesn't mean the Mac world isn't growing its enterprise abilities. Apple's attitude toward enterprise Mac use has been a lot like HP's approach to using 3000s through the 1990s. "We know the customers use our products for these classic business needs, but we're more involved in products that touch millions." Consumer is the siren call, both then and now. You could have said it about HP as it pursued the PC business during the late '90s, or about Apple today, shining its light on games and mobile applications that can run on millions of iPhones.

Meanwhile, back in the deeper reaches of the Moscone Center, Apple's third parties serve the needs of business owners and large organizations using the Mac. It's easy to forget that under its skin, the Mac OS is Unix, the same base environment HP promotes for business users. You get a peek at that Big User community when you see something like Network Attached Storage vendors offering complete RAID 5 implementations. Promise Technology rolls out a new NAS unit with 4 TB of RAID storage for $700 here, and one of the two major implementations is for site backups.

The other side of the Promise user base is media producers and consumers. At a HP trade show you wouldn't find a 50-inch flatscreen running a movie delivered off a 4-bay Direct Attached Storage unit. Product manager Billy Harrison said the company was proud to have solved the challenge of showing video at speeds that match the movie-in-a-theatre experience.

So is MacWorld for music and movie freaks, or admins who need to steward a corporation's licenses and configurations across dozens to hundreds of client systems? It's both, but Apple's gaming and media focus and phone-pumping message just shows the vendor can only embrace one kind of customer at a circus like this one.

There are business tools a-plenty out on this floor. Ipevo, the communication device arm of Skype, showed off new Skype phones and conference call devices — right alongside a pair of 5x7 digital displays which use your Mac to fetch photos and news headlines and blog updates, so you can keep up with information without stretching open another browser window. There's a Wireless Digital Frame, the Kaleido R7, that updates itself with RSS feeds from Web sites. Ipevo has been behind the scenes at Skype, but when the company rolls out a USB digital display for Internet Widgets -- a device that pushes data without interrupting workflow on the desktop client -- it expands the concept of tools a company needs to make its users productive.

The expo floor here bristles with offerings to promote the iPod and now the iPhone. HP takes space at MacWorld to tout its printer offerings. But there's also a company in the small developer mini-booths, Widget Press, offering ModelBaker. It builds Web, iPhone, iPod and Google Android applications with minimal programming skills required. ModelBaker takes the back-end app data of an enterprise and gives it a conduit to the most mobile of computers, the iPhone. Years ago companies experimented with tablet computers as a way to empower sales forces. Widgets on iPhones and Android phones prove that concept, using the fastest growing mobile devices in the industry, handheld phones.

HP makes it clear to the 3000 customer that relying on MPE/iX is, in the vendor's opinion, not a viable option compared to the riches of Unix or Windows. Maybe HP is correct in a way the vendor doesn't intend, like Apple is correct to make this conference the last one it will attend. Marketplaces and communities have visions that grow beyond a vendor's intentions. If Unix is good, why not a Unix with a polished interface and programs as powerful as The Casper Suite from JAMF Software to manage Mac clients: Patch mangement, software distribution, settings and licensing management tools?

Top 2008 Stories: News Outta HP

The company which created the HP 3000 spent many months of 2008 quiet about the product and the 3000 community, until the final quarter of the year. As the deadline for ending HP 3000 lab operations approached, HP opened up opportunities and signaled its shutdowns of 3000 information and expertise. Nothing new will be available before the end of 2010, to the regret of OpenMPE and independent technical 3000 experts.

At the same time, more options showed up to motivate migrations, mostly in the form of new functionality Hewlett-Packard will never bring to its 3000 creations. Connectivity and efficient hardware design led the announcements.

1. HP said it will start negotiations for read-only reference licenses of the MPE/iX source code. The process will be conducted under confidential disclosure so the community won't be able to judge the HP offerings to the top technical experts. The value of source code to the community will be limited to creating workarounds and crafting object-level patches, and only for the community's companies with enough expertise to understand the code. However, new versions of MPE/iX won't be possible under the proposed source license.

2. Key technical information is being withheld in the form of locked-up configuration tools and technical manuals, all of which will remain inside HP even after its 3000 support operations end in two years' time.

3. Beta-test patches are staying inside of HP's support group for at least another two years, giving the general 3000 population no access to test completed 3000 enhancements and fixes. Only support customers will be able to use these patches, or test them, even while there's no development lab to modify any of the patches based on testing reports. But many other patches got their freedom throughout the year.

4. HP closed out its 3000 information presentations at the annual HP user conference with a farewell address at the HP Technology Forum in June. A pair of third parties, MB Foster and Speedware, continued to offer migration advice at the conference, but HP made it clear that it was time to thank the customers still using HP 3000s and move away from Tech Forum 3000 briefings.

5. HP acquired EDS, taking on a group of service and consulting experts as large as Hewlett-Packard itself in a move to make the vendor service-centric. The largest acquisition since HP swallowed Compaq, the deal will re-shape the vendor into a services powerhouse which will have to pare back slow-growing computer operations to keep high-salaried experts in the stable. The vendor announced a 25,000-employee layoff within weeks of finalizing the deal. Feeding the growth needs of EDS will push HP to evaluate products such as HP-UX which are showing minimal growth — if the vendor follows the same standards that pushed HP 3000s to the curb in 2001.

6. HP Support took on the remaining 3000 operations during the year, briefing customers but offering no clue on how much contact the community might expect from support. HP's community liaison to the 3000, business manager and lab experts depart this week. These final 12 months of 2008 included many with no information whatsoever from the vendor, which didn't appear eager to address much but the migration nuances still available to companies leaving the platform.

We're taking the New Year's break off to celebrate the start of the 15th year of 3000 NewsWire fun and independence. We'll be back with a look at what to expect during 2009 with our story of January 5. Have a great R&R break.

Top 2008 Stories: Migration

The news and changes of 2008 lay behind us today, even though the year isn't over just yet. But in the quiet week between Christmas and New Year's, let's look at the Top Stories of 2008 to see where your community has traveled. In a few days we'll take a stab at where the 3000 arrow will be headed for 2009.

Let's break this down into three important aspects of community events: Migration, Homesteading and the year's News Outta HP. No matter what your strategy and plans for this year, one or all of these areas held significant developments for 3000 owners, partners and advocates. We'll look over the top six events in each area.

Migration seems the best place to start our review, since it offers more change than either homesteading or HP news. Right at the top of the year's list is the pace of migrations, which maintained its moderation despite HP's end of the year deadlines.

1. Migrations stretched 2006 deadlines, we learned this year, as companies which believed their exits would be finished by '06 found themselves still working on their projects. Even more delay on the migration march took place once the economy hit the brakes. The companies we surveyed identified success with migration from the 3000 to Unix platforms and Windows. But some were hung up waiting on replacement software.

2. Software providers counted on migration business to help support their homesteading stability. From our Q&A interview with MB Foster founder Birket Foster, to the landscape described by Bill Miller of Genesis Total Solutions, to the mix of migration and homestead revenues at STR Software, many companies made their migration efforts a backstop for customers taking a long-term strategy toward transition.

3. Migration companies added support for existing MPE apps to their offerings, especially at Speedware. A deep knowledge of HP 3000 technology was even more important than experience with the target environment, the vendor added while it reported on the success and pace of migration business.

4. Independent vendors kept offering extension technology choices for 3000 sites making a transition. Micro Focus pumped up COBOL with support of Microsoft's Azure Cloud computing and standards support in the year. Eloquence kept turning up in successful migrations where IMAGE compatibility was vital, and the database suite added new features in an 8.0 release. IMAGE and COBOL remain the standard technologies which must be replicated in a many migrations.

5. Migrating sites moved beyond HP-UX, reporting more contact with Windows or non-HP *nix platforms. Windows experts are easier to find than HP's Unix veterans and usually cost less to retain. Oracle and Suprtool tended to steer the community toward HP-UX, but .NET potential and the omnipresence of Windows in the enterprise — and the value in Linux — kept HP-UX migrations in a slight minority.

6. HP user groups consolidated into an alliance called Connect, seeking an impact by gathering in greater numbers of members. Connect served up an online social networking tool to promote the learning around 3000 alternatives such as Unix and Windows. Connect put up its first European conference in November, even while the outlook for in-person meetings grew darker.

Tomorrow we'll look over the top six homesteading stories for 2008, some of which address similar trends as migration developments. The 3000 community has feet placed in both strategies as this year is ending.

What the Community Is Doing Now

In less than one day from this morning, much of the world will close up its commercial concerns for a little while. Hanukkah is already upon us, and Christmas is tomorrow. Year-end in the IT business is a quiet time. But there's action in the advent to this period, if you look for it.

Hewlett-Packard has taken leave of action for these two weeks. The company has put on a salaries freeze as deep as anything now gripping North America's weather. The supplier of the alternative solutions for 3000 migrators will be shedding jobs as soon as 2009 begins.

"We believe it is prudent and responsible to reduce costs where possible," the company said in a statement this month. HP will reward "high performing" employees with compensation. The vendor reported record profits for its latest quarter, all while cooking up plans on how to pare down a workforce of more than 320,000. Even IBM's employee roster does not dwarf HP's today.

Employment is a 2009 issue for HP 3000 experts and veterans, too. Dale Pepoon lost his job at Circuit City tending HP 3000s last month. "I am open to contract or full time positions," he told us. "I am currently in transition. I have not been able to locate very many HP 3000 job listings, so I am trying to focus on my analysis and management skills when searching. It would be great to locate a company that is in transition to a new platform and needs the HP 3000 skills, but would be willing to train on the new technology or at least be willing to endure the learning curve."

There's hope for Dale. The largest migration services company in the community said that HP 3000 skills are even more important than experience in the target environment of a migration. He's also wise to emphasize the fundamental skills of managing enterprise IT. HP 3000 pros know much more than just the vitals of MPE/iX.

Circuit City has had its downturns along with the rest of the world's economy, the kind of setback that freezes plans to move away from the HP 3000. Hewlett-Packard, better staffed than any of its customers, finally turned off the HEART system on its HP 3000 cluster this fall. HEART tracked every beat of HP's orders for most of three decades. HP claimed long ago it had switched over every crucial enterprise app to SAP. Perhaps it's more true now than early in the decade, when the claim was made while 3000 Transition began. HEART had outlasted migration attempts for two decades, according to HP insiders.

"Most of you have no idea how big this is," said an HP VP to the internal IT staff in a memo, "so you’ll have to trust this old-timer… it’s HUGE!"

Other HP 3000s were recently turned toward the exits. Robert Mills announced to the 3000 community members this month who read the 3000 newsgroup that Pinnacle Entertainment "went into 'administration,' and I am one of the casualties of the first round of layoffs. I do not see Pinnacle remaining in that state long before they fold. When they do, that means that two HP 3000 979/400s will lose their home." Mills, like some in the community, is working at consulting that relates to the 3000 while looking for a more permanent position.

Unix is on the rise at places like Pinnacle, although it's only a 50-50 chance that it's HP's Unix taking over. Sun's solutions, and even SUSE Linux, are replacing HP 3000s. Oracle is often the platform in such cases, rather than the operating environment.

Meanwhile, Shoreline Community College, West of Seattle, continues to use an HP 3000 for its student information systems. Despite the best attempts of both Amisys and Ecometry/Escalate, both companies will have a significant share of their customers still running 3000s during 2009. Customers are just now considering replacements for systems like Series 937s, computers which were built early in the Clinton Administration. A tiny Integrity 2660 will replace a 937 nicely, and the 2660 is very affordable. The cost resides in moving software and training for Unix.

And since the HP 3000 is a big player in the history of computing, the history movement for the computer is gaining help. After this summer's MPE software history symposium at the Computer History Museum, Paul Raulerson will launch a history project next month, a not-for-profit Web site "funded primarily out of my beer money funds." Raulerson wants to preserve stories from the 3000 community, "and make them available to other people to enjoy and marvel at. The goals will be conservation and preservation of the histories and stories that surround the HP 3000 computer and related items of interest, such as the MPE operating system."

There's more 3000 history to be written in 2009, even as the effort to capture the tales of the past gathers volunteers and momentum. But this time of year is well-suited for reflection and revising of career courses. As well as R&R, of course. We're taking a couple of days off from the blog to reflect on the big stories of this year and enjoy the gifts of family and friends. We'll be back on Monday with our 2008 Top Story list, along with a review of what we predicted for this year and how our forecasts turned out. Have a happy holiday.

Where they are now: Robelle founders

Robelle is a household name among vendors and leaders of the HP 3000 community, helping companies remain on the platform "until at least 2016," according to its Web site. Suprtool is also a key component in enabling migrations from MPE/iX to HP-UX. Good tools have a wide scope of functionality.

The company was founded by Bob Green in the late 1970s, and soon afterward joined and bolstered by David Greer. Early in this decade, Greer left Robelle for adventures on a two-year family Mediterranean sailing cruise, while Green took full ownership of the company and kept its offerings abreast of the community's needs, relying on the expertise of developer Neil Armstrong and the support team in the company's Vancouver, BC offices.

Green was at the birth of the HP 3000 inside Hewlett-Packard, writing for the company and documenting the launch team's work. During the 1990s he opened a branch of Robelle on the island of Anguilla in the British West Indies. Bob (at left on that beach) updated us recently on his development workplaces and Robelle's operations. Meanwhile, Greer rejoined the IT world after his sabbatical, taking on management and marketing positions outside the 3000 community.

Green said that island life in the Carribean still floats his boat. "Our permanent residence is still Anguilla. But we also spend time in St. Barths, and during Aug-Sept. we are in Asheville, NC for hurricane season."

While he praised us for keeping the threads of the HP 3000 community alive, Green said that Robelle's business has held on "much later than I ever expected." Armstrong long ago converted Suprtool to run on the HP Integrity servers under HP-UX -- and HP's Alvina Nishimoto said this year that the Unix version of this database tool has prompted many 3000 migrations onto Unix, rather than Windows. The future of Robelle's Qedit programmer development suite looks sound, too.

As for Greer, he's a prolific member of the Linked In online social network, and he just published a management strategy paper called "Thriving Through the Downturn: Eleven Strategies That Will Make Your Company Boom." He served on IT startup boards on his return to the industry, and now is a senior advisor to VanRx Pharmaceuticals and CEO Chris Procyshyn. His Linked In profile states that

David mines his decades of business and entrepreneurial experience to provide advice on corporate development, business plans, product strategy, and financing. He is excited at the potential for the company and its products to dramatically change and improve the manufacturing and production of aseptic drugs.

Small supporters sprout up

    The 3000 community has developed a preference for non-HP support of its systems. But in recent years, even single-manned support companies are keeping HP 3000s in production. The lightly-manned support firms are serving both homesteaders and customers who are working on migrations.

    John Stephens, who founded Take Care of IT at the start of the decade, says his company not only takes up HP’s 3000 support work — he rarely sees HP support in a client’s picture.

    “I think it was about four years ago,” Stephens said of his contact. “I can’t say I got a lot of help from them.” He counts all sizes of customers among his clientele, including Fujitsu and Schlumberger.

   

Large or small company size doesn’t matter to a solo supporter like Stephens. “In the actual work, it’s still a 3000, it still has interaction with other boxes and applications. The scale of the company doesn’t really change the scale of the project.”

    Smaller vendors have been a big part of the 3000’s success. The most experienced software companies in the community are run at under 20 employees, for the most part. But support in the one-man range has been rare up to now. Gilles Schipper of GSA Associates stood for decades as a low-staff support shop with large clients.

    The size of the newer support companies is giving rise to the number of choices for 3000 service. “In addition to the traditional experts,” said Adager’s CEO Rene Woc, “we’ve been seeing some new individuals doing most of the facilities management at some of our customer sites.”

Retired 3000s pose problems of disposal

As companies migrate away from the HP 3000, some are discovering one last task which takes some extra effort to find a solution: How to dispose of a venerable computer asset by using the right salvage resources?

When you want to get that system out of the computer room, where can you take it? Like any computer system, specialized recycling companies need to be called. Christian Schneider of PIR Group has a Series 937 on hand the company hasn't powered up in five years. Disposal of about 75 pounds of computer and terminal is an unsolved issue at the development and integration company.

Schneider also noted that such systems are not lightweight, so shipping them off as a generous donation can require some freight expense.

Let's see, the SCSI SE drive weighs about 50 lbs.The 937LX is probably 20 lbs. The 12-inch terminal and keyboard are nominal. I was going to donate ours to a Chicago historical organization, but they already had one. Scrappers won't take it. The plastic housing is now listed as hazardous material. I was considering using it as a boat anchor, but it would kill the surrounding fish.

To be fair, there are many better options for disposing of an aged 3000 than being a boat anchor. There are scrappers which specialize in used computers. Like in Chicago, where there's Computer Recycling Chicago.com.

Depending on the model of HP 3000, many have value in their spare parts. An owner who's getting rid of a 3000 shouldn't expect much compensation for a system they're selling off for parts. But the operators in the 3000 community who are both selling used systems as well as supporting these servers need a supply of components. How much they need depends on the limitations of available warehouse space.

Governments are beginning to insist on responsible recycling. Purchasing a computer in California now includes a recycling fee built into the sale at retail and consumer spots like Best Buy. But Goodwill Industries' Reconnect takes on many computers, regardless of their working status.

Some vendors such as Apple have begun a free recycling program for systems which are being replaced by newer Apple models. You don't have to get rid of an Apple product, like an enterprise X Server, to use the free Apple service. You just need to buy an Apple product through Apple's Online Store or one of its retail stores. HP is not so generous, charging from $1 to $120 per item for recycling in the United States.

Just don't consider that boat anchor idea as more than a joke. You don't want to be a part of the Buy N Large movement that makes the movie WALL-E storyline a possibility.

Medford schools learning to migrate

The Medford, Oregon school district is taking the road away from the HP 3000 and into the .NET path, signing on with UNICON Conversion Technologies to migrate the district's custom applications to Windows servers.

The district (MSD) issued an RFP in July requesting proposals to migrate its in-house developed Student Information System to a native Windows environment -- and the solution needed to avoid using emulation. The apps run today on an HP 3000 N4000/200 across multiple sites within the school district. MSD’s applications are predominantly written in HP COBOL, using VPlus screens and IMAGE databases. UNICON says it got the nod for the work because it will engineer a solution that's all-Windows, according to the company's James Harding.

UNICON was selected over multiple bidders after offering its pure ‘native’ migration solution. This deliverable does not employ the use of system emulation or proprietary middleware; thereby it does not lock MSD into the project vendor after the migration -- a very important consideration for future operations where dependence upon third-party vendors can seriously compromise the stability and ongoing viability of such implementations.

UNICON will be using its in-house developed automated conversion tools to convert the HP COBOL to pure open systems Fujitsu COBOL for .NET and Windows. The tools will also to convert the IMAGE databases to Microsoft SQL-Server.

The migration supplier says there's an uptick in the number of companies which want a solution that's not tied to an environment as proprietary as the one HP's offers in its Unix. "At a time when many HP 3000 users are heavily researching migration options due to HP’s ‘end-of-life’ announcement for the HP 3000 platform, UNICON has seen a dramatic increase in the number of organizations seeking a non-proprietary approach to migration," the company's release said. "In addition, UNICON is no stranger to education, nor is it to state government, having performed many migrations for both sectors over the years.

UNICON will be performing MSD’s conversion at the vendor's main offices in Laguna Hills, California.

Testing takes a multiple-level drive

    The most exacting part of migration projects does not appear as the code is created to mirror the HP 3000's work in another environment. Migration partners and customers alike report that testing consumes the majority of resource and time in every project. Only when the answers and operations are identical on both systems, measured over a reasonable amount of time, can a migration be considered complete.

    Migration testing takes place on eight levels, according to Chris Koppe, the director of marketing at HP Platinum migration partner Speedware. There's Unit Tests, determining if the code runs; functionality, checking the results of the code against a known application; then performance, integration, interfaces, processes, holistic system tests and finally user acceptance.

    Speedware finished up work on a migration at Tufts Health Plan this year. The customer took on the bulk of testing because they knew their business logic inside the application best.

    “At Tufts they wanted to make sure the application worked, because they wrote it,” Koppe said. In this kind of “lift and shift” migration, no rewriting or packaged applications are employed. A migration customer with this goal simply wants the same level of functionality on a platform that, like Tufts, they can describe as having less risk and more business continuity than an HP 3000.

   

Technology choices come from the customer, too, but only after they’ve been briefed on the potential of all prospective choices. In the Tufts project, the HMO chose Eloquence as its replacement database for TurboIMAGE, and then worked through multiple deployments of migration drops. For more than six months, the new target database ran in synchronization with the still-functional TurboIMAGE database. The Imaxsoft utility OpenTurbo managed the repeated synchronizations.

    Tufts was using NetBase, too, and it was replaced with replication technology inside the Eloquence database. “You have to educate the customers on all of the options,” Koppe said. “We train them in what they choose to use, and they select on the basis of what technology stack they want to live with for the foreseeable future.”

    Migration business in the 3000 community still presents a growth period for Speedware during 2009, he said. HP’s announcement of an extended Mature Product Support period in 2009-10 created a lull for the marketplace, but activity is restarting. With a mean time-frame of 15 to 18 months for a migration, companies starting in 2009 may just make the deadline before HP ends its support altogether for the system.

    One good motivator for the launch of migrations might be something which Koppe called a human resources map. “You have an aging set of programmers who are managing these systems,” he said. “If companies actually did HR maps, they’d realize that a lot of the people who know how to maintain their legacy systems are up for retirement in the next five to 10 years.”

Migration plan increases odds of success

    HP 3000 migrations get compared to Y2K projects a lot, according to Speedware’s Chris Koppe. Not only for the complexity and crucial stakes of the multi-year efforts. When a migration project succeeds, users don’t even see a difference.

    Koppe, who directs marketing for the e3000 Platinum Migration Partner, said his firm’s services team owns a 100 percent success rate in migrations so far, a period of work and research covering all of HP’s march to the end of its 3000 business. Staying perfect over more than six years boils down to three fundamentals.

    “We leverage automated tools almost everywhere,” he said. “The next cornerstone is proven methodology and processes. The last one is resources — and if you don’t have enough deep knowledge of the legacy system, you won’t know what it’s supposed to do on the target platform.”

    Speedware completed a migration recently of HP 3000 applications at Tufts Health Plan, an HMO running a mix of COBOL, PowerHouse and three dozen other technologies related to the 3000. At the end of a 30-month period, the HMO had 14 technologies running in concert on HP’s Unix, completed to move one batch and one online 3000 to HP-UX partitions mirroring each other.

   

Koppe said that Speedware is wrapping up four migration projects for 3000 customers this year. In a project that Tufts extended several times because of internal business reasons, the migration becomes “a non-event” to the company’s users, as invisible as any Y2K project.

    The work at Tufts shared elements common to many such projects at a medium-sized 3000 site. A pair of N-Class servers hosted apps written in-house, with extensive utilization of NetBase replication and Omnidex optimization of TurboIMAGE. But the trick to success in these migrations is not mastery of the new technologies as much as melding the new mix. And the complete span of the necessary work doesn’t reveal itself on a first survey.

    “We describe these as waterfall projects,” Koppe said, “where you’re not going to know everything that exists up front. You have to plan for a number of issues that will come up, and make sure your timeline has some flexibility in it.” Diving into the Tufts project revealed complex batch schedule dependencies, and “an application jumping between PowerHouse and COBOL at the user interface level.”

    Migrations in the 3000 community usually mark a “code drop” as a fundamental milestone, “and the first code drop at Tufts was certainly a challenging one” because of the complexities. But most customers sign up for their share of the challenge to succeed, the portion they know better than any migration service provider: testing.

    Speedware unit-tested its code for functionality, “and some customers want us to do all the testing for them. We have a very comprehensive testing workshop we do with the customers. It’s about a 50-50 split in terms of the work, because it’s not just IT people testing. Functional testing might be done by IT people, but user acceptance testing has to be done by the user community. The testing itself is very resource-consuming to an organization.”

Connect director slate includes 3000 ally

The Connect user group has offered its slate of directors for posts which start in the coming year. The organization that was created out of Encompass, ITUG and Interex Europe groups wants members to vote on the slate by Dec. 14.

A full profile of the lineup is available at the Connect Web site. The group is naming five directors to fill the board seats that expire at the end of December, and it offers its board of directors as a bundle because this year all three organizations needed representation. This is the first combined board for Connect. So members can vote to accept or reject, but not cast ballots for individual directors.

A face familiar to the 3000 community is among the slate of new directors. Speedware's marketing director Chris Koppe, a veteran of the boards of both Encompass and Interex, is on the track to joining the Connect leadership. Koppe has been instrumental in founding Connect and establishing the HP Technology Forum and Expo as a keystone for Encompass and Connect. He's currently chairing the user group's IT committee.

Connect members have received an e-mail to collect their "accept" or "reject" votes. Joining the group is affordable and a way to have a voice in HP's business decisions for its migration platform products.

A total of 17 people were evaluated by Connect's nominations committee to create the five-director slate. Taking on a volunteer job like this means two years of meetings, decisions and organization, Connect said in its request for member balloting.

Through the nominations process, the Committee determined that each candidate, having demonstrated exemplary dedication and service to the HP user community, is qualified to serve as a director of the organization.

By accepting these nominations, the listed individuals and their employers are making a substantial commitment of both personal and organizational time and resources for the duration of their two-year term.