IIUG news and information

Greetings from the International Informix Users Group! This is the first in a series of periodic updates on what's happening in the IIUG and the Informix user group community around the world. For those who are not familiar with the IIUG, we are in our second year of operation. The group was formally established at the 1995 Informix Worldwide User Conference in San Jose, CA. Briefly, the goals and purposes of the IIUG are: 1. to promote the growth of local and regional Informix user groups; 2. to give all users a unified and coherent voice to advise and influence Informix on issues they find important; 3. to foster the development of individual Informix users; 4. to coordinate the collection and distribution of user-contributed resources; 5. to provide an user group organization to users in areas not served by a local or regional group. Together with the User Group Program staff at Informix we've come a long way towards meeting many of our objectives. Here's a brief look at what's happened and projects currently underway. IIUG.ORG Through a generous grant of hardware, software and network bandwidth, the IIUG has a full service Internet presence under the "iiug.org" domain name. With WWW and ftp services, users can search the entire history of the comp.databases.informix newsgroup or the world's largest public collection of Informix-oriented resources. The Informix FAQ can also be found here. As published here a few weeks ago, the software indices have recently been re-worked for easier access. Our site can be reached at "http://www.iiug.org/"; or at 204.167.252.80 IIUG Membership Services There are currently over 2,100 members of the IIUG. We have a program for local and regional groups to provide free memberships in the IIUG to their members if they want to. We are working on providing a secured method to allow members to update or correct their own information. Contact membership@iiug.org for more information. IIUG Charter The inaugural Board of Directors elected in 1995 was charged with developing a structure and an overall direction for the organization. One of the results of this effort is a Charter and Bylaws that were approved in meetings of the Informix User Group Leadership Council (IUGLC), and the IIUG general membership held at the recent Informix Worldwide User Conference in Chicago, IL. After the document undergoes legal review, we will announce procedures for final ratification. A copy of the approved draft may be found at "http://www.iiug.org/iiug/charter.html";. IIUG Board of Directors Changes Members attending the IIUG General Meeting elected a new Board of Directors as recommended by the IIUG election committee. The committee placed nine names in nomination for Board membership. In addition, the committee recommended that two Board positions be left vacant to be filled at a later date by individuals from outside the U.S. The Board met to elect the President as specified in the Charter. Carlton Doe from Salt Lake City, UT, was elected President for the 1996/97 term replacing Walt Hultgren who had chaired the group's Organizing Committee and had served as the group's first President. For a full list of the members of the Board of Directors and a brief biographical sketch, visit http://www.iiug.org/iiug/iiug_board.html. The Informix User Group Leadership Council (IUGLC) The Leadership Council is an advisory body to the IIUG on issues concerning local, regional or special interest user groups around the world. The Council met for the first time at the Chicago conference. Over 30 people representing close to 20 user groups in 7 countries attended. They formed three committees to work on newsletter publishing, starting or strengthening local groups and member surveys and communications. The survey and communications committee put together a short survey which was conducted out of the IIUG booth on the exhibit floor. Based on the survey results we saw the following: Approximately 27,000 end user and 1,700 development licenses were represented Sun Solaris, HP-UX and AIX were almost evenly represented, there were more NT platforms than SCO Unix Windows 3.1 was the dominate client platform by a good margin. Character based terminals, Win 95 and Windows NT were almost evenly distributed Products in use as well as product perceptions varied widely. On the whole, feelings about the products were overwhelmingly positive with close to 80% of the respondents indicating they would recommend Informix products to others. This was not surprising given the survey was conducted during the conference. We intend on conducting additional surveys this year and are working on getting these prepared. There is significant interest within Informix to see the results we collect. They are looking for the feedback we can provide. Other IIUG News We continue to work on getting more discounts and other financial benefits for IIUG members like that offered on IWUC registration fees this year. We hope to be able to announce more on this shortly. Several groups of people have approached us about creating product-specific Special Interest Groups (SIGs) as part of the IIUG organization to provide specialized focus and support on those products. Look for more information in the near future. Our new logo now graces our WWW pages. General User Group information The Nordic Informix User Group Conference will be held on the 2nd & 3rd of October. Contact Nils Myklebust at Nils.Myklebust@ccmail.telemax.no for more information. The next meeting of the Informix User Group of Colorado will be held on September 20th. This is a day long meeting called Web Day and will include training in Informix related Web topics. Contact Cathy Kipp at ckipp@verinet.com for more information. The next meeting of the Utah Informix Users Groups has been tentatively set for October 8. Details on the topics to be discussed will be available soon at their web site http://www.xmission.com/~dbaresrc/uiug_next.html. Carlton ______________________________________________________________________ Carlton Doe "It's not *over* until I win!" DBA Resources, Inc. -- Les Brown Salt Lake City, UT dbaresrc@xmission.com http://www.xmission.com/~dbaresrc carlton@errin.dbaresrc.com PGP key: finger -l dbaresrc@xmission.com