With the Denver event less than a month away, the U2 team is doing final reviews of all the sessions, and making final hotel arrangements for U2 University 2009, the premier U2 technical event. The U.S. event will be Sept. 16-18 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Denver. The hotel was completely renovated earlier this year. "Our customers told us they really liked being in downtown Denver, with its pedestrian mall and many restaurants. Of course, with so many technical sessions we don't expect customers to have too much free time to explore. But since the event ends on Friday, we expect some customers will take the opportunity to stay for the weekend to enjoy Colorado," says Susie Siegesmund, director, U2 Data Servers & Tools, IBM Information Management.
On the product front, IBM released U2.NET v1.2 last month. The main feature of this release is support for internationalization via NLS. Additionally, notes Siegesmund, "We've just completed the beta program for SystemBuilder Extensible Architecture (SB/XA) GA2. This was a very active beta with over 50 participants, both internal and external, testing the product and providing feedback. The beta ran from June through mid-August, and we are now in the middle of collating our survey responses." The survey is part of the IBM processes that requires the seal of approval of beta participants prior to actually releasing a product. The next phase will be final code changes, extensive QA and porting, leading to a release in the fourth quarter of 2009.
IBM U2 is now represented in the social media world, regularly providing inputs and interacting with the IBM U2 community on both Twitter and Facebook. Follow IBM U2 on Twitter, and get information about the latest events and share photos and discussions on Facebook.
Customers who have not yet registered for U2U can do so here. Attendees should check out the hands-on labs-new this year-and register for them in advance as space is limited. Free certification exams will also be offered at the event.