SHARE is an independent, volunteer organization providing education, professional networking, and industry influence in Mainframe and Enterprise IT. SHARE benefits are year-round, but it is best known for its Summer and Winter conferences. These are week-long gatherings of IT professionals with a System z focus. In 2016 the winter conference was held in San Antonio, Texas, and the summer event was held in Atlanta, Georgia. Here are some highlights of the 2016 summer event which was held July 31^st through August 5^th.

Over 500 sessions were presented covering 6 Program tracks: Application Architecture, Enterprise Data Center, Information Management, Linux and VM, MVS, and SHARE-wide. These Programs are further divided into 25 tracks dedicated to topics from CICS to z/VM (APIs were covered in many of these tracks, so A-z if you please).

How many sessions in a track? Summer 2016 in Atlanta offered: 27 CICS; 25 Security; 28 Linux; 29 Capacity Planning & Performance, 30 VM, 67 on MVS Core Technologies; 41 Storage Management, and many more. The shortest track was on SAN/Disk/Tape which consisted of 10 sessions.

There were several hands-on labs covering a wide range of experiences from basic ISPF and Linux training to configuring OpenSSH on z/OS. SHARE also hosted 6 large networking events, 32 vendor sponsored breakfast, or lunch learning opportunities, and the Technology Exposition where you could talk to vendors about the products you use (like QuickRef®), or those you are interested in.

Check out SHARE.ORG for more information about their offerings and we hope to see you in San Jose, CA, March 5-10, 2017