UNITE is continuously looking for better ways to support the Unisys user community, to provide useful resources to our membership, and to facilitate the exchange of information and experiences within the community.

To that end, we are initiating a blog on the UNITE web site, The MCP Insider, to be devoted to general MCP issues, including software development, system administration, operational support, and MCP Express. We plan to make posts to this blog at least monthly. We are also contemplating additional blogs for more specific subject areas.

This initial post for The MCP Insider describes our current vision for the blog and the context in which we hope it will develop. We intend for this to be a wide-spectrum publication, with posts ranging from simple Tips & Tricks articles, similar to the "I Didn't Know You Could Do That!" sessions at the annual UNITE conferences, to longer technical papers of the sort that would regularly appear in the late, lamented Gregory A Series / ClearPath Technical Journal. Our goal is to disseminate technical information, user experience, and deeper system understanding from MCP experts and other users to the user community at large.

The blog will be publicly available on the Internet -- anyone can access it for reading posts. Readers have the opportunity to submit comments to the posts, but only if they are registered users and logged onto the UNITE web site.

We have a small cadre of MCP experts who have agreed to prepare posts periodically for this blog. Submissions are welcome from anyone, however. All submissions will be reviewed, approved, and edited by the blog administrators -- initially Alan Lechtenberg and Paul Kimpel. We will be publishing format and style criteria for article submissions in a forthcoming post.

We will also gladly accept suggestions of topics for future articles and attempt to find an appropriate expert to write a post on that topic. Candidate articles, suggestions for future topics, and "Letters to the Editor" can be sent to the blog administrators at MCPInsider@unite.org.

We welcome your comments, suggestions, and other feedback on both the concept for this blog and its forthcoming content. We also hope you will find this to be an interesting and useful service for UNITE to provide to the user community.

To kick off this blog, we have an excellent article by Jim Stewart, well-known DMSII expert and creator of the popular dbaTOOLS analysis and monitoring facility, on DMSII buffer management. Following that, we will start a series of articles on MCP Express. We hope to intersperse this series with other articles of interest to MCP developers and administrators as they become available.

To receive notices of new posts to the blog, you may wish to consider subscribing to RSS or Atom feeds from the blog index page, https://unite.org/blog-posts/.

The Editors,
Alan Lechtenberg
Paul Kimpel