An inaugural enewsletter (tentatively called zNEWS) will be sent out in June, formally announcing the destinationz.org community.

In fact, Destination z has been around since 2007 and had 26 founding members. Since then,  more business partners, supporting members, and academic members have joined, bring the number of members to 100 by the end of 2010. This next phase broadens the membership to include IBM System z clients and it’s planned to provide numerous resources and benefits.

Here’s their logo:

According to an article on the MainframeZone Web site: “The latest phase will bring value to mainframe clients and their employees by providing rich Web content, connecting the community through social media, and creating a ‘one-stop shop”’for everything z through an index of key resources, including IBM and partner product content, customer stories, and links to blogs, forums, an online mentorship program to introduce students to the mainframe community, and more. These members can access all the resources available through the Website and can opt to be included in special communications from both the IBM Destination z Team and IBM Business Partner members.”

To my mind, anything that helps the community of mainframe users has got to be good, and I’ve pre-registered to become a member. You might like to do the same.

And while we’re on the subject of moving things around, you might be interested to know that the IBM Information Champion programme has changed its home location.

For the past few years, it has been sitting at www-01.ibm.com/software/data/champion/, but it is now on IBM’s developerWorks site at www.ibm.com/developerworks/champion, and they’re promising that the shorter URL of www.ibm.com/champion will work. There’s also a new logo:

I’ve been a ‘Champion’ each year since 2009. You can see me my profile at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/profiles/html/profileView.do?key=d5b16dc4-2a16-4a1b-86d5-dc4d1cd7d318&lang=en.

The change of location is, I believe, part of IBM’s strategy to raise the profile of this programme and help increase awareness of mainframes to the general public.

Hopefully, after the summer, with these two initiatives, information and other resources for mainframers will be more readily available and easier to locate.

DB2 is IBM’s flagship database management system designed to handle both relational data as well as data stored as XML documents. The hallmark characteristics of DB2 are world’s best proven performance, virtually unlimited scalability, unmatched reliability and security.

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