On Jul 25, 2014, at 1:37 PM, Charles Mills wrote:

How is the Z platform served by making "how to attend your first SHARE" a more arcane question than "how to attain the highest rank of Freemasonry"?

There should be a big banner on the Web site "welcome to YOUR first SHARE."

Agreed there should be a how to section and everything spelled out in that section.


I know it has been dismissed here ad nauseum but I find this just one more example of SHARE "exclusiveness." "We are full members of the SHARE club and you're not, ha ha."

I am not sure if its exclusiveness or SHARE (and the company that does its web site) I think it is just poor thoughtfulness on SHARE's part. When (5+ years ago) the SHARE web site was reasonable that is I could find things and d/l PDF's quite easily. Somewhere along the line the company that does the web site changed everything and it was unbelievably bad and they could not make up their mind if the web site was open to all or only SHARE members . They have redesigned it (yet again) and its better now for d/ling papers (Thats all I use it for) searching is still iffy and usually worthless unless you know the session #. IMO they could do better with search engine. I looked at the section (long time ago) for joining and thought the information was scattered and unorganized. I live in Chicago and don't have a problem calling them but I am not a good example. Someone living in Europe might run up a nice phone bill trying to find information that should reasonably easy (IMO) to find and oh yes don't forget the time differences.
SHARE probably should make it easier to find joining information.

Ed

I think the company orientation of SHARE is an idea whose time has passed. What is the vision here? That corporations will go "by gum, we ought to join SHARE" and then its employees will start showing up? People make things happen. SHARE should welcome individuals, and then encourage them to go back and lobby their organizations to send more people, and then say "you know, you could save money if you joined as an organization." Furthermore there is a lot of job mobility, a lot of one-man Z software companies, lots of individual freelancers -- the overarching company orientation just does not make sense any more.

Let the flames begin.

Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM- [email protected]] On Behalf Of Joel C. Ewing
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 6:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Beginners question about SHARE

But, somewhat surprisingly neither the SHARE web pages on "Becoming a Member" nor the page at the "Join SHARE" link from that page lay out the basic requirements for becoming a member or the potential annual costs involved with membership. Perhaps this is present somewhere in the process of actually filling out an on-line membership request, but I would think a potential member wouldn't be inclined to proceed down that route unless corporate authorization had been granted to proceed -- and the first question my boss asked when we first wanted to join SHARE was the cost of membership. That was back in pre-web days, and the hard copy information we had from SHARE at the time made costs much easier to determine than the current web site.

It took me a while to find most of that information on the web site, and I knew what I was looking for. This is pretty basic stuff that a prospective member organization would want to know up front to evaluate what SHARE would do to their budget. They shouldn't have to research and understand the implications of lengthy Policy and By Laws documents on the web site to figure it out.

Obviously if you could establish direct contact with someone at SHARE they could no doubt immediately provide that information, but as others have pointed out there may reasons that is difficult. The web site could certainly stand some improvements in this area.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN

Reply via email to