New Atlanta Control-M User Group In The Works!

I recently attended a first time Control-M User Group conference in the Atlanta, Georgia area. It was organized by a fellow Georgian and my favorite BMC rep. He did an outstanding job of putting on the event. It had a very nice turnout and some of the BMC technical staff showed up as well. Even better, it’s also nice to know that there are other fellow Control-M folks close by in my area. We discussed the latest Workload Automation Change Tool and a product called Control-M for Hadoop. We also covered some basics of Control-M Version 8 for a lot of the audience member’s whose environments were still running previous versions of Control-M. Of course we had good food and SWAG too!

This first meeting has set a good foundation to possibly make an official User Group at the next event. I think the frequency of these meetings should be quarterly. This will give us plenty of time to arrange to be out of the office and keep the event from getting watered down. As things move forward I would really like to see our User Group stay consistent. We need to keep these events organized and open for good discussions. In the future our members do not need to be afraid to ask questions, share horror stories, share awesome stories and those Aha moments! Every time we attend these events we need to remember to make our rounds and introduce ourselves to others. Maybe we could arrange games to allow all attendees to introduce themselves. Maybe a little Control-M trivia would be cool? Such as what was the Hadoop product named after? Also these User Group Events need to have a lot of SWAG from BMC. I mean we had pretty good swag at this User Group meeting but I think we should have the good stuff every time. Also lets make sure we always have good food.(The food was good at this one) I am just saying this group will not be allowed to do pizza. Our User Group needs to be able to listen to it’s members and provide answers that they think might help. Also if technical BMC Control-M experts are in attendance we can leverage with them on Control-M topics as well. These are just a few of my ideas. Looking forward to hearing more ideas from others! Regardless of what is decided, the end result should be I can’t wait to try that in the office tomorrow!