Trends > Social Media

IMS Gets Social

Gain more from your IMS investment using social tools

As if the day-to-day optimization that IBM’s Information Management Systems (IMS) provides wasn’t enough, now IMS users can utilize social media and other online tools to gain more value from their database- and transaction-management investment.

Corporations that already use IMS to provide structured data, lean transactions, high volumes and high efficiency can also gain continuous education, enhanced user interchange, and added value with hints and tips via newsletters, conferences, seminars, webcasts and more. For a complete list of resources, visit www.ibm.com/ims.

IMS Newsletter

Highlighting the latest IMS information, the IMS newsletter is a quarterly publication that covers information on IMS products, solutions and services, offerings, partner solutions, customer stories and upcoming events. It also highlights members of the IMS community: customers, partners and IBMers. Don’t miss out! Go online to see the latest issue and subscribe.

Social Media

To further share information, IMS is now also taking advantage of the latest networking media: Facebook, Twitter and blogs. The IMS Community offers the opportunity to interact online with your peers. Join the forums and blogs and discuss your successes, challenges, hints and tips. Discover new ways of doing business to help accelerate your company’s on-demand transformation.

• Twitter lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What’s happening? Join today to start receiving IBM_IMS’s tweets.
• Facebook is the community for multi-generation IMS users. Visit the IBM-IMS page.
• LinkedIn also provides a means for exchanging information, ideas and opportunities. IMS NEWS on LinkedIn offers the latest news about IBM IMS events and announcements of interest to the IMS community.
• Aggregate your favorite blogs and talk or listen to interesting IMS happenings on the IMS Blog.
• The IMS List forum provides a dialog for you to interact with your peers to share concerns and guidance. You can join the discussion by sending an e-mail with the command SUBSCRIBE IMS-L.

IMS-Society

The International Mainframe Software Society (IMS-Society) is a nonprofit organization helping to maintain the IBM mainframe platform. It offers a wide range of information, education and workshops to help you maintain and extend IBM mainframe applications. Its major objective is to develop education classes, certify instructors and provide a platform for information exchange. It also offers an IMS forum for you to learn more about IMS events and communicate with your peers.

developerWorks

The latest development information about IMS is also available on developerWorks. While developerWorks is all about great technical content, My developerWorks is all about you. It’s the professional network for developers, students and IT pros. It provides a unified set of community tools for connecting, sharing and collaborating with other developers. It can help you troubleshoot technical problems, share your knowledge and perspectives, and collaborate with and gain wisdom from recognized experts. It helps you enrich and personalize your overall community experience. Network with developers, analysts, admins and other techies. Tailor your profile to quickly find content of interest, grow your technical skills and connections, bookmark content and groups of interest, and much more.

User Groups

Guide Share and other IMS user groups are found around the world. There are regional and virtual IMS user groups. IMS User Groups are local communities of IMS users (application programmers, systems administrators and database administrators) who depend on IMS to run their business-critical applications. Meetings are held to discuss new ideas, IMS technologies, and tips to help maximize user investment in IMS and IMS-related products. Participating in these meetings, you have the opportunity to keep up to date with the latest IMS technology, network with other IMS users, share experiences and team with IMS development by providing your feedback.

Attend an IMS user group meeting in your area; get together with friends and colleagues to see how you can benefit from the power of working together—in the heart of the IMS community. If there are none in your area, Virtual IMS is an online user group established as a way for individuals using IMS systems to exchange information, learn new techniques and advance their skills with the product. It provides a central point for coordinating periodic meetings of technically oriented topics—presented in a webinar format—and for providing articles, discussions, links and other related resources of interest.

IMS Widget

To get IMS information out quickly and easily in a highly visible way, we have also created an IMS Widget. The Widget is located at the top of the right navigation of the community website and other networking websites, as well as the IMS home page. The Widget uses RSS feeds, which allow us to dynamically post (and delete) information with immediacy. There are four sections: What’s New in IMS and IMS Tools; IMS Regional User Group Events; System z and IMS in the press; and IMS Events.

I’m a fan. Are you?

To enable information sharing, IMS takes advantage of the latest networking media. Reach out and join us to discover new ways to simplify your efforts and accelerate your company’s business.