First of all, many thanks to all who attended last Tuesday's webcast.
Many thanks too to those who took the time to comment about the
program (both on-and-off-list). If I may, I'd like to clarify one or two
of the things we said on the webcast and explain why we said them.
First of all - many have written me to ask if I'll send them a copy of
the presentation. As I said during the program, by this time next week,
we hope to have a streaming file with all the webcast audio and grafix
included on the e3000 website at www.hp.com/go/e3000. The ppt
file with the slides will be also be available on the web for hp partners.
Secondly - my profound apologies to those who were unable to register.
We had to cut off registration in order to ensure that there would be
enough "seats" in our virtual classroom.
Our license with Placeware artificially restricts us from hosting more than
500 customers at a time. Up until this week, that seemed like a per-
fectly reasonable restriction. It's been my experience that if you have
any more than 500 people online, the q&a becomes completely un-
manageable. As it was, we were not able to get to many of the questions
that were submitted via the web. However, we have captured those
questions, and I'm using it to update the "transition FAQ" file which we'll
also have on the web sometime next week.
Thirdly - I appreciate the fact that some people were disappointed
in the level of detail that we presented this week. But I beg to remind the
more learned readers of this list that this webcast was primarily targetted
at the *average* MPE customer. And that fact dictated that we begin
at the beginning - elementary as it may be. I s'pose I could have tried
to explain all the ins-and-outs of how to migrate an application from
MPE/iX to HP-UX, Linux or Windows (or all 3) in 90 minutes - but I'm not
sure that even *I* can talk *that* fast.
Consequently - I'd like to open up a dialog with the broader MPE comm-
unity about how to best deliver training that does cover this topic in
a sufficent level of detail to meet most of your needs and at a reasonable
cost. Oh yes - and a thought about those last two words, "reasonable
cost".
During the webcast, I said that in the future, we are planning to deliver
two different kinds of web-based programs:
1) We will continue to do *free* webcasts which contain news
and information about new migration tools and services as
these things become available. These *free* webcasts are
primarily vehicles for HP marketing (which is why they're free).
They will contain some technical content. I don't think I'm
being too cynical if I characterize the technical content as
the "bait" which is there to get you to come to hear the
marketing....
2) In addition to the *free* webcasts, we would also like to try
delivering real honest-to-goodness skills training over the web.
This skills training is quite different from the marketing content
that we've been presenting in the past year. These programs
will be *all* technical content, with *little* *or* *no* market-
ing fluff. They will teach you how to migrate - step by step.
And finally - with some trepidation - I'd like to raise the question of whether
or not you think HP would be completely unreasonable to ask you to *pay*
a fee for this training. During this week's webcast, we surveyed the
community, asking what you thought a reasonable price might be. Frankly,
I was a little surprised at the furor that was raised by this question. In
addition to the comments that were made on this list, I received a small
number of emails that can best be described as "agitated" by the idea. HP
has *always* charged for technical training in the past. It costs us
money to develop it and deliver it. To be honest, we're only interested
in charging enough to cover our costs - and no more.
Oh yes - one last thing. HP has begun a discussion group over on
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/CategoryHome/1,,262,00.html that's
specifically focused on e3000-to-whatever transitions. I've posted some
thoughts there about what we might cover in the training webcasts.
I'd be interested in your comments. Here's what I had to say, cross-
posted to comp.sys.hp.mpe (and by extension to 3000-L)...
===
This is in response to Chuck's question about a schedule for our
upcoming webcast series. We haven't finalized it yet - which is
actually good news because it means there's still time to tell us
what you want us to do in these webcasts. Based on little more
than my own humble opinion :^) we were thinking that the
schedule ought to look something like this:
TRANSITION TRAINING TENTATIVE WEBCAST SCHEDULE
SUBJECT TO CHANGE:
==============================================
Webcast 1: March timeframe
---------------------------
Porting your business logic from MPE/iX to other platforms:
Language issues...
For each target platform, (HP-UX, Linux, Windows): What
compilers are available for COBOL, C and FORTRAN?
What ANSII standards do the MPE compilers adhere to?
What standards to the compilers on the target platforms
adhere to?
What extensions to the ANSII standards are supported by the
HP compilers? Are similar extensions supported by any of the
target platform compilers?
Porting COBOL code from MPE/iX to each target platform (step
by step)
What to do about 3000-based software written in other
languages: (Pascal, MODCAL, SPL, COGNOS, QUIZ & QUICK,
RPG, etc...)
Webcast 2 - Database issues 1 - April timeframe?
--------------------------------------
Option 1 - preserving the database logic (TurboIMAGE calls) in
your source code for use on the target platform:
* Mapping IMAGE datasets into RDBMS
tables -or- Migrating TurboIMAGE data
to a normalized rdb
* Using 'wrappers' to intercept
TurboIMAGE calls and translate
them to SQL calls.
* Gotchas, Performance issues
Option 2 - rewriting the database portion of your applications for use with a
relational database.
* To map or to normalize?
Webcast 3 - Database issues 2 - May timeframe?
--------------------------------------
Option 3 - emulating TurboIMAGE on the target platform.
* Using Eloquence
- Features
- Limitations
- Using eloquence step by step
* Other options???
Webcast 4 - User Interface - June timeframe?
--------------------------------------
1) Application uses VPLUS
- Emulating VPLUS on the target platform
- Packages that do vplus emualtion
- Performance, gotchas
- Intercepting VPLUS calls and trans-
lating them to something else
(e.g. curses)
- "Webbification" opportunities
- packages
2) Application uses a character mode UI
- migrating home-grown code
- translating to curses
- other options?
=====================================
So that's a thumbnail sketch of what the training *might* look like - what have
I forgotten?
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