I just returned from the Opening Session of this years Common Conference here in Anaheim.

I was surprised to here about the new Common Skills Portal: http://www.common.org/skills/ Something I’m certainly going to spend a little time looking at!

Some time was spent honoring Common’s best speakers, followed by a presentation of iSociety: http://isociety.common.org/

Mark Shearer took the stage along with Dr. Frank.

Dr. Frank had just come from 1998 and was quite surprised to here how his beloved AS400 had turned out. It was a lot of fun to watch. Even though I think Dr. Frank should keep his day job and leave acting to the pros (Ha! Just kidding… )

Mark continued on with his presentation and spent some time talking about Blade Center integration, IP Telephony, Capacity Backup systems, PHP and MySql…

Next we got to here more about the recently announced System i Express systems - http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp5052.html

As at every Common Conference we heard that IBM was going to improve the marking of the System i .. Nothing new here <smile>

Mark also talked about how IBM was working to help improve the System i Skills shortage. Something we all should be concerned about. To learn more about this initiative take a look here:

http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/university/scholars/products/iseries/index.html

 We got to see another skit making fun of Intel Servers… This is always good for a laugh and then the session closed with a few minutes of Q&A …

All in all I enjoyed attending … and I wish all of you could have been here too…

Kenneth