ASAP University 2024 TWS Education+Training
2024-05-19 - 2024-05-22
ASAP U Conference 2024 takes place on May 19-22 in Miami, Florida. ASAP U Conferences bring together many Workload Automation experts from all over the world to collaborate, network, learn, inspire, and much more. With 30+ sessions, labs and certification exams to choose from and attend, you can aways expect to walk away with more knowledge and inspiration to implement into your work environment. Register here.

Open Mainframe Project Ambassador and Zowe contributor Domenico D’Alterio, Principle Product Manager at IBM, will be on-site at the conference with a Zowe session. Stay tuned here for more details about his session and the rest of the agenda.
This event is managed by ASAP, which aims to provide the Workload Automation user community with a forum to learn, explore, and achieve results for their company as well as themselves. ASAP is committed to be the user voice behind workload automation issues to help drive the development of product enhancements. This organization is a place where our members can reach out and get real life examples and solutions to every day automation needs. For more details about the event, visit the main conference website.

Zowe Quarterly Webinar
2024-05-29 08:30 - 09:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Join the Zowe community on Wednesday, May 29 at 8:30-9:30 am PT/11:30-12:30 pm ET for the next quarterly update! Register here.
With Zowe v3 on the release horizon, Team Config for Zowe CLI and Zowe Explorer for VS Code becomes more relevant than ever. The Zowe Community introduced Team Config to take the burden of learning, understanding, and implementing connectivity away from every user – which is what v1 profiles required.
Join this session for a comprehensive review of Team Config, what it looks like, how best to leverage it, and (for those of you still using v1 profiles) best practices for converting Zowe CLI v1 profiles to Team Config to ensure you and your team are ready for Zowe v3!
Speaker: Adan Wolfe, Product Owner at Broadcom and Open Mainframe Project Ambassador
Register here.

SHARE Kansas City 2024
2024-08-04 - 2024-08-08
SHARE is an independent volunteer-run information technology association that provides education, professional networking and industry influence. SHARE Kansas City 2024 will be held from August 4-8, 2024, offering access to the latest enterprise IT news, key focus areas, prominent industry leaders, and product highlights on emerging technologies.SHARE is an associate member of the Open Mainframe Project and Open Mainframe ambassadors will be on-site. Check out these Open Mainframe Project -related sessions and register here. All technical sessions will take place at the Loews Kansas City Hotel. All times are in Central Time.
Sunday, August 4:
5:00-6:00 PM: Putting Inclusivity, Belonging and Allyship in Action: The Power of Mutual Mentoring – Dr. Gloria Chance (The Mousai Group) and Megan Rupert (Broadcom)
Mentoring is a dual relationship with a mentor passing on knowledge, skills, and values to a mentee. The give/take connection between mentor and mentee can seem very one-sided. After all, we all know mentees benefit as the recipients. (Psychology Today).
Mutual mentoring, also referred to as peer mentoring, is a collaborative mentoring relationship, where two individuals actively learn and support each other’s professional and personal growth. In this style of mentoring, both participants take on the role of the mentor and mentee, which creates an interactive learning environment.
Join us as we demo how to execute the mutual mentoring experience where you will:
● Learn how mutual mentoring can be a form of allyship.
● Experience and expand emotional intelligence and active listening.
● Explore questions that spark important dialog.
This skill will enhance the foundation of what’s important to developing innovative teams and relationships that drive peak performance and creative thinking.
Monday, August 5:
9:15 – 10:15 am: It’s a Jungle Gym: Today’s Mainframe Workforce Roles & Careers – J.J. Lovett, David Bond, SHIVA SABERI, Sean Rooney (Broadcom)
Today’s modern mainframe career path looks more like a jungle gym with moves in any direction offering roles with tremendous growth opportunities. Why do you choose to be a mainframer? Which role do you choose first? How do you plot a path to success in the today’s mainframe community? You may be surprised at how much opportunity exists within the Mainframe workforce. Join us for a panel of mainframers including both new and tenured, to explore the possibilities.
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM: Top 10 Administrative Tips for Achieving & Retaining a Healthy, High-Performing Zowe – Jan Prihoda (Broadcom) and Joseph Winchester (IBM)
Join the Zowe Community SMEs for tips & tricks on administration and troubleshooting Zowe. This session will provide attendees with the necessary tools and techniques for monitoring the health, performance and usage of the Core Zowe server components. (API Mediation Layer, ZSS, ZIS, Desktop)
2:30-3:30 PM: In the Spotlight:In the Spotlight: OpenTelemetry for the Mainframe – Ruediger Schulze (IBM) and Aaron Young (Broadcom)
OpenTelemetry is crucial for modern observability. With an effective observability, businesses gain better insight into their often-complex distributed applications and can respond faster to revenue impacting issues. OpenTelemetry provides the technical ingredients to extract and transform signals from arbitrary sources for flexible distribution to any backend. The collaboration of OpenTelemetry project and the Open Mainframe Project has led to the creation a new Special Interest Group (SIG) “OpenTelemetry on Mainframe” at the begin of this year. This group aims to enable OpenTelemetry for the mainframe and simplify the telemetry export and consumption on mainframes. Join us to learn about OpenTelemetry, its enhancements for the mainframe driven by the SIG, and see how its open-source components can be used for mainframe applications.
3:45 PM – 4:45 PM: Optimizing Zowe’s API Mediation Layer for Complex Enterprise Workloads – Andrej Chmelo, Joseph Winchester (IBM) and Steve Able
Designed for experienced users, this session dives deep into advanced configuration techniques for the Zowe API Mediation Layer. Discover how to optimize your setup for high availability, security, and performance. Attendees will leave with expert knowledge on implementing typical and complex enterprise configurations.
3:45 pm – 4:45 PM: (*Secondary track): Integrating Mainframe Testing with VS Code and IntelliJ IDEA – Alex Burak and Uladzislau Kalesnikau (IBA Group)
Mainframe software testing plays a crucial role in the modern DevOps pipeline. A key principle is automating testing and doing it early in the development cycle – and doing it repeatedly. The aim is to catch and fix bugs quickly, minimize redoing work, and guarantee quality before building and delivering new code to production. During the session, we’ll show you how Galasa works with Zowe, VS Code and IntelliJ as a part of CI/CD pipeline.
7-8:30 PM: Making Our Strong Community Strong Reception
We’re crafting a speed mentoring experience that will provide a chance to quickly meet others for a human experience where both individuals gain support and perspective via dual mentoring.
Tuesday, August 6:
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM: Learn How Zowe Explorer Is Empowering Both New and Experienced Mainframers – Joseph Winchester (IBM),Billie Simmons (IBM), Murali Panchalingam (IBM UK) and Emma Skovgård
Zowe Explorer has become the “New face of Z” not just for students and folks new to the patform doing mainframe learning courses, but has become a useful tool for experienced system programmers and developers to be productive with a powerful tool interfacing with the IBM Z platform. This talk will cover the Zowe Explorer plugin for VS Code, showing how to work with data sets, Unix System Services, JES, as well as issue TSO and MVS console commands. In addition we’ll showcase the CICS extension that allows developers to build COBOL and Java applications all from within the VS Code environment. We’ll also talk about recent developments in version 3 around authentication to support more protocols like x509 client certificate auth.
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM: (*Secondary track): Continuous End-to-End Testing for Mainframe Applications – Alex Burak and Uladzislau Kalesnikau (IBA Group)
In the past, mainframe system testing was limited to legacy tools and required specialized knowledge. Today, with the adoption of of open source tools and projects (OMP & Zowe) any team can easily integrate test and build stage into their CI/CD pipeline. Come join us for a discussion and we will showcase practical scenarios, including unit testing with test4z and Cobol Check, functional testing with Galasa, and deployment management with Automan for z/OS test environments. Finally, we’ll share our plans, the development of IntelliJ plugins for test4z
10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Let’s Talk Zowe! End Users Share Their Stories – Joseph Winchester (IBM),Domenico D’Alterio (IBM) and John Mertic (The Linux Foundation)
From mainframe education to DevOps & self-service automation and beyond. Join your peers and learn how organizations like yours are leveraging Zowe to address their critical business needs
10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: (*Secondary track): Building & Delivering Secure Software: An Overview of Zowe’s Zero Trust Architecture – Mark Ackert,Rose Sakach (Broadcom)
In today’s environment, implementing Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) is an essential step for any organization that wants to ensure the security of its digital assets. ZTA is a security strategy that focuses on verifying user identity and access rights before granting access to resources. Join this session to learn more about the strategy, where you can start with the implementation, how Zowe implements ZTA and its different components in that strategy.
1:15 PM – 2:15 PM: (*Panel): Collaboration Learning: Crowdsourcing Mainframe Education – John Mertic (The Linux Foundation), Michael Bauer (Broadcom), J.J. Lovett (Broadcom), Keelia Estrada-Moeller (Broadcom)
Open Mainframe Project has education opportunities that has helped more than 200 students, new developers and engineers looking for a refresher. Whether it is the hands-on COBOL Programming Course, Mainframe Open Education focusing on ‘open sourcing’ mainframe learning roadmaps and community knowledge transfer, or the Mentorship program, there is something for everyone. Join us to learn (pun intended!) about the educational opportunities offered through the Open Mainframe Project and how you can get involved either as a student or a teacher/mentor.
2:15 PM – 3:15 PM: DevSecOps and Shift-Left Security Strategy within Zowe – Donna Hudi (Phoenix Software International), Andrej chmelo and Dan Kelosky
Short for development, security and operations, DevSecOps automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle, from initial design through integration, testing, deployment and software delivery. The core principles and practices of DevSecOps revolve around the idea of ‘shifting security left,’ meaning that security considerations are introduced as early as possible in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This proactive stance ensures that security is not an afterthought but an integral part of the entire process. Join us to learn how the DevSecOps and shift-left security strategy are implemented within Zowe.
3:30 PM – 4:30 PM: Take Your Mainframe Career to a New Level by Contributing to Zowe! – Dan Kelosky and Frank Giordano
This session will explore advancing your technical skills by contributing to Zowe. From modern to low level languages and frameworks such as: Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, Angular, Java, Spring Boot, HLASM, and Metal C, we’ll cover the bulk of Zowe’s underlying technologies and discuss how the project onboards new Community members. We will conclude by highlighting a recent contribution: the Zowe Java Client SDK
Wednesday, August 7:
8:45 AM – 9:45 AM: Leverage Zowe Extensions to Integrate zAIOps in Hybrid Cloud Applications – Joseph Winchester (IBM) and Domenico D’Alterio (IBM)
Zowe technology delivers new ways to integrate IBM Z system management into the enterprise processes and applications, protecting the investment made on IBM Z. Zowe helps to make the IBM Z platform easier to learn and use for next-generation IT staff and developers. Come and learn how IBM System Management offerings like IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView and IBM Z Workload Scheduler, expand Zowe framework with specific extensions to have an easier way to integrate Automation of system, applications, processing and more in a hybrid cloud environment. A demo of the ZOWE CLI extensions available for the products listed above will be performed during the session, to show the value add in the data center management of them. Come and learn about use cases that leverage REST API for Automation as well as CLI extensions of Zowe in an hybrid cloud environment.
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM: (*Secondary track): How Zowe Modernizes the Interaction with Legendary Products – Domenico D’Alterio (IBM)
Zowe technology delivers new ways to integrate IBM Z system management into the enterprise processes and applications, protecting the investment made on IBM Z. Zowe helps to make the IBM Z platform easier to learn and use for next-generation IT staff and developers. Come and learn how IBM System Management offerings like IBM Z System Automation, IBM Z NetView and IBM Z Workload Scheduler, expand Zowe framework with specific extensions to have an easier way to integrate Automation of system, applications, processing and more in a hybrid cloud environment. A demo of the ZOWE CLI extensions available for the products listed above will be performed during the session, to show the value add in the data center management of them. Come and learn about use cases that leverage REST API for Automation as well as CLI extensions of Zowe in an hybrid cloud environment.
Thursday, August 8:
8:45 AM – 9:45 AM: Zowe and Galasa Together – Joseph Winchester (IBM) and Gerald Mitchell (IBM)
Open mainframe projects Zowe and Galasa just make sense together. Come see all the ways Zowe just vibes with its new friend
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM: The Emergence of Boot Camps and Apprenticeships on the Mainframe Education Landscape – Dr. Cameron Seay, IBM Z Academic Thought Leader and Adjunct Professor at Tennessee State University and East Carolina University.
For the past 10-15 years the industry has expressed growing concern over finding new talent for the platform. Focused attempts to generate interest at major colleges to teach mainframe have yielded limited results (though the Historically Black Colleges seem to keep teaching mainframe). Industry appears to have all but given up on recruiting new mainframers from colleges, and are turning to non-curricular methods of finding and training students. Prominent among these are boot camps and apprenticeships. This session will share our experiences with both and lessons learned from these experiences. Further, we will offer recommendations for future actions on the parts of industry, academia, and students to expose the incredible opportunities this platform provides.
12:30 – 1:30 pm: CBTTape – Open Source for z/OS – Greatest Hits – Lionel Dyck
The CBTTape has been around since the last quarter of the last century of the last millennium and currently has over 1,000 separate files with each consisting of from one to dozens of unique tools. What kind of tools? Everything from exploiting PDSE member generations to RACF Administration to Catalog management to Dynamic Steplib, z/OS E-Mail (with attachments), Text to HTML/PDF/RTF conversion, Dynamic ISPF Menus, many ISPF Edit macros, and more. And it is all open-source and available for immediate download and use – of course you would never just use it without reviewing the source and doing your own due diligence in testing.
3:00-4:00 pm: Bit Bucket X ’44’ – Ed Jaffe and Donna Hudi (Phoenix Software), Lionel Dyck, Mike Shorkend, Tom Conley
Take a whirlwind tour of z/OS features and topics too small to have a session of their own, but too important and interesting to overlook. You can take these insights into the worlds of z/OS Systems Programming, Hardware, Storage Management, and all things mainframe from our expert practitioners and put them straight to use back home. The Bit Bucket has been a tradition at SHARE since 1991. Topics are always a surprise, at times even to the presenters, but never disappoint. To view past Bit Bucket presentations, visit the SHARE website at: https://www.share.org/Events/Past-Events/Proceedings.
Check out the complete schedule for SHARE and register here.

Zowe Q1 2025 Webinar
2025-03-19 08:00 - 09:00
Join Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe community on Wednesday, March 19 at 8 am PT/11 am ET for our first quarterly webinar of the year! Whether you are a Zowe User, Contributor, Extender or simply interested in what’s happening with Zowe, we invite you to attend the webinar to learn more.
In this webinar, Jakub Balhar, Chair of the Zowe TSC and Open Mainframe Project Ambassador, will present an overview of the architectural changes coming to the API Mediation Layer and answer questions. Rose Sakach, Open Mainframe Project ambassador, will also present updates about Zowe.
Register here.

Zowe Q2 Webinar: Understanding Zowe Docs and using AI for Effective Navigation
2025-07-01 08:00 - 09:00
Whether you are installing, configuring, trouble-shooting, or just learning about Zowe, Zowe Docs will be your go-to guide. In this webinar on Tuesday, July 1 at 8 am PT/11 am ET, the members of the Zowe community will share tips and best practices for optimal navigation and take you through a live tour with example use cases. A step-by-step demo on how to open an issue real-time will help improve the documentation for everyone while instantly making you a contributor to the Zowe Community. We will conclude with a demonstration on how best to partner with AI to answer Zowe questions and find Zowe specifics. Register here.
Speakers: Ana Ceron, Andrew Jandacek, Jakub Balhar, Rose Sakach

CLI Meets AI: Introducing ZCrafter (Webinar)
2025-12-05 09:00 - 10:00
ZCrafter is a CLI tool that helps you work with COBOL, JCL, and mainframe systems using AI. You ask questions, analyze code for bugs, troubleshoot errors and get instant answers about mainframe development. Based on Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe, ZCrafter was created by NIU students in the IBM Z Student Ambassador Program.
Join us on Friday, December 5 at 9 am PT/12 pm ET for a presentation that will include an overview and live demo of ZCrafter. The creators will also be sharing their journey into mainframes, their experience with open source, trends in AI and technology and the future of mainframe. Register for the event here.
Speakers: NIU Students Victor Taiwo, Sang Pham, Oyewale Adeoye, and Paris Richards
