I agree, but it's important to note that there are far more similarities than differences. Most of the differences you see between country sites are the same thing you would see different between two sites within the USA.
You can have a site in Arizona (which doesn't do daylight savings) and one in Alaska that are basically identical, and two others in the same places that are worlds apart because of their own local "mods". The location doesn't govern the differences for the most part, it's more a blend of the people who worked on those systems in the past and how they approached "getting things done". The fact that they might be in different states or countries is not the deciding factor for the most part of their differences or similarities. If someone is running vanilla CICS/TS V5.2 in Texas, it's probably going to be identical, or close to it, to the one someone is running in Dubai. There are lots of cultural differences, but if you ask data center support people in Maine about dealing with data center support in Dallas, you will find that they feel they are on different planets. I'm not trying to say there are no differences due to the specific country, but there are far more similarities. Also, two sites in the same foreign country, for instance France, can be totally dissimilar, or could be twins, the same as any two other sites. Maybe it's because I have see so many (literally) hundreds of sites, that I tend to always see the similarities. The differences between any two sites will always be there, whether they are 2 miles or 12,000 miles apart. I think that as far as IBM mainframes are concerned, aside from language, the country of residence is almost irrelevant. (just my opinion, feel free to disagree) Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN