Greatest 3000 user conference to saddle up
February 15, 2007
Anne Howard, a Greater Houston RUG board member and candidate for the OpenMPE board of directors (get to the OpenMPE site, join for free, and vote!) has offered the first article about why you should reserve this September's travel for the next HP 3000 Conference.
We'll let this 3000 veteran tell the story herself here. Put the middle weekend of September on your travel requests. This conference is going to be inexpensive to attend, as well as travel to in Texas.
I want to tell you about the greatest little user conference in Texas. The November 2006 Greater Houston Regional User Group Conference (GHRUG) was an outstanding opportunity for system administrators and end users to get up close and personal with some of the most dynamic people in the HP world. Held at the University of Houston Clear Lake just outside the gates of Johnson Space Center, our little Texas event had quite an international flair with presenters from all over the world.
Canada’s Birket Foster from MBFoster. Nicholas Fortin from Speedware/Activant and Gilles Schipper from GSA, Inc. Michael Marxmeier from Marxmeier Software AG joined us from Germany and and ScreenJet’s Alan Yeo came over from from England.
Charles Finey from Transformix Computer Corp joined us from California, and we had Texas’ own leading HP consultants Matt Perdue, Paul Edwards and Bill Hassell, along with Richard Sonnier from Nimble Services.
The presentations were fantastic and the keynote from Adager's Alfredo Rego was riveting.
What our little conference did not have was a high price tag. The entire three-day event was only $200.
The other thing we did not have in 2006 was a lot of attendees. And that is a shame. It was a great conference with ample opportunity to spend one on one quality time with some very knowledge HP professionals. These folks are just too busy to spend much personal time with individuals at the big national and international conferences. It isn’t that they don’t want to, they do. But there are just so many people. Not so with regional conferences.
These smaller events cost far less than going to the big conferences and give more opportunity to get close and ask questions. And we very much appreciate the effort these presenters make to come and support our regional group.
The GHRUG user group is very active and is committed to its mission of providing timely and relevant information to technology professionals. This year’s conference is scheduled for September 2007 at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. What we need now is to hear from you. Tell us what you need and we will find the best presenters possible.
Some people think of GHRUG as HP 3000 concentric. While back in the heyday of the HP3 000 this might have been the case, it is no longer. Along with the HP 3000 presentations on homesteading and migration, the 2006 conference had some excellent non-HP 3000 presentations such as HP-UX security and migrating databases to MySQL, with plenty of time for back and forth discussion.
So tell us what you need. Unlike some other HP user groups, membership in GHRUG is free. Visit us at www.ghrug.org and let us know what you are using these days at your sites — and what presentations would benefit you the most. If it involves HP, we are there. We hope you will be too!