So why are they so great? Well let’s just skip over the fact that they are free full-day seminars for the moment. They are also being taught by the IBM Hursley UK lab team, so you can be sure you are going to be in the hands of the experts (infact I see that CICS Distinguished Engineer Ian Mitchell will be one of the main speakers at the seminar, which is about as good as it gets). The seminar is based around the new CICS TS V4.1 release and won’t just be covering the new functionality in the new release but will also be showing you how to extract real value from your CICS regions.

The seminar is split into 3 sessions:

1. Revitalizing Business
2. Revitalizing Applications
3. Simplifying your IT Environment

This is a seminar that is going to introduce you to what I consider to be the most consumable CICS Transaction Server to date. Part of this is about taking your existing assets and very quickly extracting new value without having to change them. The data inside your CICS regions is now more accessible and readily available than ever before, helping your business to be much more pro-active, flexible and adaptable to new opportunities and challenges that may come your way. To help you get there even faster, the CICS tools are there to help analyze and configure your CICS regions so those opportunities and challenges can be identified with ease.

There is a huge amount of new functionality in CICS TS V4.1, from the CICS Explorer, Event Processing, Atom support, SCA and a whole lot more. If you want to find out how to take advantage, then register for the seminar today so you don’t miss out. These are just the first two dates scheduled, look out for more seminars in April!

Full information on the seminar and registration can be found here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/lmi/cics/index.html

There is also a little more information in the PDF for the seminar here:
2010 Revitalizing your CICS

If you are reading this blog you are probably working somewhere that uses IBM mainframes and may be interested in helping to ensure that university students have had a taste of the mainframe (or -sorry Chris – proper computing as I call it).

So if you or your organisation has relationships with UK universities, then please make sure that they are aware of the upcoming UK Student Mainframe Contest. This is a really good way for UK university students to learn about System z.

If students participate and they get through the early challenges they will get their mitts on CICS and other z/OS software… Though the chance of winning a Sony Playstation 3 might be more of an incentive than getting first hand use of CICS .

WSTEs are free, but you do have to have register for the live WSTEs

Once the webcast is complete, there is normally a live Q&A with the WSTE presenter.

The upcoming schedule of WSTEs can be found here.

Previous WSTEs which you can replay are available here. These come in a varietly of formats, some are PDFs of the slides used for the webcast and possibly an associated MP3 file for audio, or you may need to register and you will be sent a link for the replay.

To just see the previous CICS related WSTEs try here.