The Board of Directors is working very hard to renew and improve the value that EDGE brings to the CA Gen community. We have completed our work on refocusing EDGE solely on the CA Gen Model Driven Development environment. Also, we have taken on a leadership role within CAs Product Line Community for CA Gen. Finally, we have established our budget and initiatives for 2007. We are ready to Rock and Roll!

One of our 2007 initiatives is to produce a quarterly newsletter focused on the EDGE community. In this first newsletter of 2007, you will learn about:

As always we welcome your input, guidance and volunteerism. If you would like to get involved in any of the activities you read about in this newsletter, please call our U.S. EDGE office at 1.312.245.1589 and speak to one of our staff members. Or, if you wish, send an e-mail to judi.michaels@eds.com or sandra.barr@eds.com or info@edgeusergroup.org and your request will be directed to the appropriate area.

Thanks in advance for your active participation. As Chairman, I look forward to a great 2007, working with a great Board, focused on a great development environment, energized by a great community!

Thank you again for your support of the EDGE user group.

Larry Schmidt

Chairman, EDGE

Should a Component Based Development Special Interest Group meeting be held this year?

It has been a few years now since EDGE held a focused event around the development of Components. We are, however, seeing more and more use of Components in both the deployment of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and in the re-architecting of legacy applications. Many in our community are deploying SOA through CA Gen Component capabilities. As such, we believe it would be great to pull together the CBD SIG to focus on best practices in this area and discover the next set of requirements for CA Gen to support our needs.

One suggestion is to run the CBD SIG during the two days prior to the EMEA 2007 Conference. We would again focus on SOA and Legacy Renewal, or alternately, take a topic from the field. Your interest in attending will gauge the planning for this event. If you are interested, please contact the U.S. EDGE office at 1.312.245.1589 or send an e-mail to info@edgeusergroup.org letting us know you are interested and your willingness to present and/or participate in planning.

In the book Built to Last, one of the founding principles of enduring great corporations is the concept of preserve the core, stimulate progress. The EDGE Board feels strongly that CA Gen is a great Model-Driven Development tool and, as such, desires to actively participate in preserving the core community and stimulating progress and growth. One of our ideas is to be the leader and facilitator of a new initiative to assist us with providing our input into the strategic plan for CA Gen. We are calling this initiative the EDGE CIO Forum.

The CIO Forum will focus on educating the decision makers that select development environments and/or tool suites for application development and then seeking their collective input. Education will consist of the latest capabilities and strategies for CA Gen. The Forum participants will then assist EDGE in building the next set of requirements for future releases of CA Gen. The Board believes this will allow our community to benefit from the collective thinking of the decision makers as we strive to develop Win-Win-Win-Win propositions for our technology partner CA, our companion products and services partners, corporations and entities using CA Gen, and most importantly, you as a member of EDGE.

We are in the early planning stages of the development of the EDGE CIO Forum. As always, we look for volunteers to assist with the deployment of this strategy. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact our U.S. EDGE office at 1.312.245.1589 or info@edgeusergroup.org.

CA World will take place April 22-26 at the Venetian Las Vegas and Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. There are 2 free pre-conference education sessions (Upgrading CA Gen to z/os and CA Gen and SOA). Sixteen informative sessions help you to optimize your CA Gen investment and learn more about topics such as Service Oriented Architecture, legacy renewal and new GEN features. One session will be a panel discussion on today's mainframe experience/innovation. Two labs are included in the session mix: New Diagram Trace Facility and GEN/UML.

A reception sponsored by EDGE will be held on April 23 during CA World. We'd like to invite everyone to join us for refreshments and quality networking time with your peers! Stop by our reception to interact with the EDGE Board as well as members of the EDGE Community. While you are there, pick up some information on EDGEucate 2007 - the new and improved U.S. educational event. (Watch the daily CA World newspaper for details.)

Europeans, mark your calendars! The EDGE EMEA 2007 Conference will be held in October 2007. Preferred location is London, UK. Discussions are underway regarding the exact date, venue, program, etc. If you have session ideas, comments, concerns, want to contribute, would like to volunteer, etc., please contact the EDGE EMEA Conference chair, Eric ten Harkel at Eric.ten.Harkel@coolprofs.com.

Details will soon be available on the EDGE Web site.

This year the U.S. event is being revamped and boasts a new name, venue, and timeframe! EDGEucate 2007 is set for October 29-31 in Plano, Texas. At this education focused event exclusively for Gen users, you will have the opportunity to network and learn from fellow users, developers and CA experts. Watch for the Call for Speakers coming soon. Volunteers are welcome! Contact US event chair Judi Michaels at judi.michaels@eds.com or the EDGE office at info@edgeusergroup.org with your session ideas, suggestions, comments, etc.

Watch the EDGE Web site for details.

The goal of the Advocacy Program is to provide CA with a Gen user view on priorities for the list of enhancement requests (DAR). Over the last few months we have been busy soliciting Edge members to participate in this effort. We are really happy to report that the team now consists of 19 members from all continents. We asked all team members to specify their 30 most important DARs from the original list of 755 DARs. The results will be analyzed and a summary report created which will be given to CA. Of course the summary will also be shared with the team members and the EDGE community. The Advocacy Program is executed under the responsibility of Rob Jasper (Edge Director of Advocacy, rob.jasper@schuitema.nl) with the help of Armin Sterk (COOLProfs).

The EDGE team is busy working on revamping the EDGE Web site. The new site provides an easy to use interface with the ability to download files on topics such as common action blocks and conference information, find information on vendor products, network with other Gen professionals and read how-to articles related to Gen development. The site is a complete replacement of the current site and is based around a content management system to make it easy to submit, approve and update content. The new site contains a modern forum system with a HTML editor and threaded discussions. Users have the ability to post comments on articles and vote for their favorites. We look forward to seeing you online soon! (The URL will not change so your bookmark will still be good!)

Once again, membership in the EDGE user group is free for 2007. If you are not already an EDGE member, please take the time to sign up for your free 2007 membership on the EDGE Web site at www.edgeusergroup.org.