Join other members of Texas Multi-Value User Group in a night of social / professional networking and professional development on March 4th, 2010.

Door-prize: Fully paid Conference Pass to International Spectrum Conference $895.00 value ($1,095.00 after March 1st)

(Lodging & Travel not included)

Texmug is committed to delivering value to it's users / participants by providing technical sessions on current topics while enlarging your personal and professional network. 

Mar 4th Agenda

5:00 pm - Social Networking

5: 30 - Technical Session 1: Object Oriented Development for the Multi-value Developer - Dick Thiot, Maverick Systems (live)

6:15 - Serve Supper: Eddie Deen's BAR-B-Que (BYOB beverage, ice and cups provided)

6:40 - Short General Business session:

a) Introduction of Texmug Officers

b) Industry news

c) Door Prize drawing

d) User to User Q&A,

e) Your topic here

7:00 - Demonstration Session 2: MV-Script - Brian Leach, Brian Leach Consulting (UK) (remote)

8:00 - Q&A for Brian, Dick, or User to User on any topic covered during the night

8:20 - Final thoughts, Social Networking, Pack up

8:30 - Adjourn

About TEXMUG - www.texmug.org

The Texas Multi-Value User Group (TEXMUG) is a technical/professional group of end users, developers, and suppliers, networking together to enhance member skills and knowledge. Presentations cover database tuning, programming methods, application development tools, issues related to multi-value environments, and current events in the MV industry. Topics of general interest to IT professionals such as Data Warehousing, SQL, C#, Java, Reporting Services, and Business Intelligence are also addressed, with a view to integration/interoperation with an MV environment.

About our location - http://www.partyoffthegrid.com/

Enjoy the unusual and chique surroundings of the former Dallas Power and Light substation - converted to a premium event destination.  With modern facilities and Wifi accessible - Party off the grid has been host to a variety of receptions, dinners, ceremononies.  Texmug wishes to thank our host Bruce G. for donating our meeting space for this month's meeting.

About our Caterer - http://www.eddiedeen.com/

Texmug wishes to thank Eddie Deen's Bar-B-Que for catering our meal this month.

You will need to purchase a ticket for this meeting.  Please see our RSVP page.

'TEXMUG' members enjoyed a good meeting with Northgate Information Solutions on June 25th, 2009.

Many of us began our MV career on some version of Reality, or Pick, the 1st two 'marketed' variants of the wildly successful multi-value database model. We had a good summary of what Northgate Information Systems has done with Reality in recent years.

We will post the documents from the meeting shortly.

Mark Pick, long-time MV Professional, who has held Executive posts with several of the MV db/svc vendors, was our 1st presenter, followed by Mark Fuller, Director of Development for Reality, based in the UK offices.

A free demo of Reality is available for download at this site:

 http://www.northgate-reality.com so you can begin your own development project in  REALITY!.

Northgate has provided us with the slideshow from the meeting.

 Please click here to download the powerpoint presentation.

 If you prefer a pdf of the presentation click here instead.

 ... and for a summary of REALITY features, click here.

This Month --- Peer presenters - our own Texmug Developers/Integrators will present 3 reports of recently completed projects, using MV tools.  Learn about U2 Webservices, Bravo Dashboard and more...

Set session 1 @ 4:30 Business Intelligence & Dashboard Choices
Set session 2 @ 5:45 Supper and General Session
Session 3 @ U2 Web Services - a recent project reviewed, by Bruce Holt

Check back often for more details.

U2 Webservices presentation info:

The project is a new system being developed by Neiman Marcus in partnership with IBM. In general, this project will be the core system in which merchants (our buying group) will create, edit and view Styles, SKU's, Purchase Orders, Offer Items (that's mail order catalog vernacular) and Vendors. Disparate systems contain portions of the data the merchants use for these activities, including UniVerse. UniVerse hosts our main application for order entry and inventory control and is the system of record for a large portion of our business data. This project uses web services to pass data between these disparate systems and a common data store. As far as software is concerned, a suite of applications have been developed by IBM for IBM's WebSphere Portal Server, Process Server and Product Center products. These applications handle the interactions between the WebSphere products themselves (usually by web services but can use another internal messaging engine), interactions between WebSphere and the disparate business systems (via web services) as well as managing the common data store. For the UniVerse side, we have developed web services with the IBM U2 Web Services Development Tool as required, including the underlying UniBASIC subroutines to support the activities called for by the web services.

Our Dec 4th meeting will be sponsored by DesignBais, providers of the product of the same name.  DesignBais is a functionally rich toolset that allows developers to design and create enterprise wide web-based applications

Rick Weiser will be the presenter.  Rick has been working with MultiValue technology for 25+ years and joined DesignBais in Spring of 2005. During his career, he has been involved with application programming, consulting, and IT management and now as Vice President of Client Services has focused on technical and sales roles.

See their website at www.designbais.com.

DesignBAIS supports the creation of design templates. These design templates allow for creation of a standard user interface that can be easily applied throughout an application or its modules. With drop down top menus and side bar menus as a standard feature, user navigation is simple and intuitive.

DesignBAIS was developed to create enterprise applications, not only one-off forms.

DesignBAIS provides a zero client deployment solution.  Internet Explorer 6 or above is the only requirement for extended functionality, WC3 compliance makes applications available on all compliant browsers.

This makes DesignBAIS applications available to everyone immediately - its simply a link.

DesignBAIS provides a conversion toolset from SB+ to make moving your application to the web even easier.

All of the functionality normally associated with multivalue application development is supported natively within DesignBAIS:

• Rapid Development
• Existing Basic code can be reused
• Comprehensive development and runtime tool set that does not require multivalue programmers to learn Internet programming
• Comprehensive XML Interface between the multivalue database and the Web Browser
• Internet Explorer document model to render forms via DHTML.
• Standard browser controls, multi-value entry and active reporting
• Architecture ensures zero client-side deployment
• Secure environment utilising password authentication and encrypted communication
• Field Validation and lookups within the browser
• Field based security
• Responsive and scaleable
• Cascading style sheets
• Font and image support
• Vertical and horizontal scroll bar support significantly increases screen real estate
• Multiple form support
• Glossary support
• Multi-language support
• Elegant and simple report writer

The 3rd Qtr 2008 TEXMUG meeting will be held on Thursday, Sept 25th, 2008.  We will have the opportunity to hear from our meeting sponsor MITS.  MITS offers software tools for Business Reporting and Intelligence.  Please plan on joining us for an informative meeting on the Business Reporting and Intelligence market and the software tools offered by MITS.

TexMUG MITS Session Descriptions

The 2nd Qtr 2008 TEXMUG meeting was held on Thursday, June 19th, 2008. The afternoon technical sessions ran from 4:00-6:00 p.m. and the evening session began with networking and dinner at 6:10pm, followed by the evening presentation.  The following topics were discussed:

DBXML

Basics of the U2 XML/DB Mapping Tool
Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is now playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere.
Very simply stated, XML is a flexible text format that allows application developers to create their own customized tags thus enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.
XML Documents use document type definition (DTD) or XML schema (XSD) files that describe the data contained within the primary document. Applications use DTDs and XML schemas to "map" relevant data within XML documents to their local database.
XML/DB is a tool provided by IBM for the U2 product and is used to build “map” files from the dictionaries of U2 files. You could create XML formatted data from Universe or Unidata by writing a program of your own but U2 has several tools to easily facilitate the exchange of data from/to XML and the U2 database utilizing these mapping files.  Once you have the mapping file, you can use these features.
This presentation will show you how to quickly set up and operate the XML/DB program and introduce the basics of XML parsing using TCL-level commands (DB.TOXML, XML.TODB) to exchange data in XML format to and from U2 format files.
Also, you will be given the source code for a sample Basic program that makes use of Basic-level XML commands to open, read, and parse data from an XML format file obtained from an Internet website using SOAP protocols and an XML mapping file.

MultiValue Imaging

We could never seem to get a document management system to the top of the budget, so we (Infosys) decided to experiment with the interaction of Universe and other software.  Goals were no cost, secure and simple for the user.  We created the system, named SOS for Secure Online Storage, and currently have almost 750,000 documents stored.  Universe controls it all, from setting NTFS security, generating barcodes on everything, to allowing productive document set displays based on cross reference from the main Universe database.

OpenQM

In this session we will see and discuss one of the newest multivalue offerings, OpenQM from Ladybridge Software in the UK.  This multivalue database product runs on Linux and Windows, supports running from a USB Memory Stick, has a Open Source Version and comes bundled with Accuterm and Coyote Web Server.  We will also discuss some other features that sets this product apart from the other database products in the marketplace.

We had a great get together on March 27th and had a great presentation from IBM on their U2 product line.  If you weren't there you missed a great opportunity to learn more about what IBM is doing in the Multivalue market.  Below is the pre-meeting summary:

Join other Multi-value and IT professionals March 27th at the Sheraton Grand Hotel – DFW for enlightening technical discussions and professional networking over a delicious dinner. Texmug is re-casting the user group paradigm, merging a growing virtual community with live presentations.

Our host for our Quarterly meeting in March is Strategy7. S7 President Joe Rodriguez and Bill Winter of IBM will lead 2 technical discussions in the afternoon, and provide the dinner presentation that evening. How to integrate your multi-value environment with .Net, or web-services, or a data warehouse are the topics we will discuss.

The technical discussions on Datastage, and Redback web-services will each provide executive summaries of the technology discussed for the CIO's and IS Directors among us, but with enough meat and potatoes, "How-it-works" detail, to satisfy the MV Developer. You will understand how this technology could benefit your operation and what your action items are going forward.

The evening presentation over dessert, .Net and Multi-Value, will discuss the importance of the .Net framework, an overview of the U2 .Net Provider, the IBM add-ins for Visual Studio, and how your Multi-Value application can be accelerated to further greatness through .Net.

No expense has been spared to make this the most effective, informative, and first class user meeting you have ever attended. The presenters, the technical content, and the facilities will rival anything you will encounter at a paid national conference you might attend, only this is available on a regional level, without the travel and lodging expenses. Your participation is vital to insure Texmug is able to attract other notable presenters and hosts for
future events and meetings.

Please RSVP by March 17th to attend the Dinner session. All sessions and dinner are free, provided this meeting as a courtesy of Strategy7 our host. You may attend only the evening session if you cannot make either of the late afternoon technical sessions.

Come on out and extend your personal network, re-meet old friends, sharpen your skills.

Meeting Sponsors:
Strategy 7 - www.s7.com
IBM U2 Products Division - www-306.ibm.com/software/data/u2/