I remember my first visit to a users' group meeting. I had just bought my first computer, a Mac S. E., and then attended a Boston Computer Society Meeting. There were several hundred people there. Well, not people exactly, they were mostly computer programmers. I found out these amateur experts were willing answer any and all of my questions, give me free software, and more importantly, create a place for me to talk about my new Macintosh.
A few years latter I attended my first MUMPS Users Group. Over a thousand people attended the conferences and I walked around like a kid in a candy store. Once again I had that amazing experience of getting all my questions answered, of having my bag filled to overflowing with diskettes of free software and of having spent the better part of a week in the company of computer programmers who believed as I did, that MUMPS was the end all of computer programming languages.
Time brings about change, some making things better. MUMPS became M, and then Caché®. Our old PDPs first were replaced with VAX's and then with those ubiquitous PCs that sit under our desks these days and have more computing power than NASA did for the first moon shot. MUG (the MUMPS Users Group) became the MTA (M Technology Association) with a staff of over a dozen and conferences combined with the big guys.
Sometimes those changes are not for the better. Our membership has declined from over 2000 to just over 450 this year. The MTA responded to the decline in attendance and membership by going back to our original mission to be a user group run by volunteers.
Times have indeed changed. One-programmer shops have become multi-layered IM departments. It's no longer enough just knowing MUMPS. These days, to write an "M" application, you may need to know SQL, ODBC, HTML, JavaScript, maybe some Java, TCP/IP, how to run a web server, what CGI is, and on and on. Now more than ever, we MUMPS programmers need a user group to support us.
To facilitate this change we decided to create a Web Portal, programmed in WebLink® and Caché® (along with HTML, JavaScript, etc.)-- to replace the costly activities that we could no longer afford. In San Diego, it was surprisingly easy to get people to sign up to volunteer to participate in this new structure. In the months since, however, it has not been as easy to get busy programmers to actually find the time to do the would that's needed to create that portal.
Although we had over 25 people sign up for our Caché WebLink user group, none of them actually knew WebLink. They were signing up to learn WebLink. Although this is a perfectly good use of the site, the question remains, how do we get the portal programmed in the meantime?
The answer is the same as it has always been, for volunteer organizations: Volunteer.
The first obstacle was to find an ISP which offered Caché WebLink as its common gateway interface (CGI). Innocently, I called up InterSystems and asked for their "list" of ISP's offering Caché WebLink. I figured, that I would select the ISP closest to my home, and use them. Rude awakening. InterSystems knew of no ISP's offering Caché WebLink. To make a long story short, I realized that if the MTA wanted a WebLink ISP, we would have to become one ourselves. I found an adventurous start-up ISP near my home, who was willing to put my computer on his T1 line, as an experiment to see how well WebLink worked. We're currently still running on my little 233 NT machine, but expect to be moved to his real NT server any week now.
The next step was to create a prototype of the portal, so that all of you can see it, make suggestions and be involved. Even though he does not program in Caché WebLink, once a week David Whitten and I have a phone conference call where I describe the work I've done on the prototype. He makes suggestions, and we agree on the programming tasks that the other programmers and I will do in the following week. One of his suggestions was to make available to all of you, the M community, a detailed description of what it took to create the M portal web site in Caché WebLink. To that end, each programmer on the project, keeps a weekly log, which we publish on the web, describing the work we've done this week. In that way, you can follow the process week by week (adding your own two cents either through e-mail or on the form provided), or come in at the end and read the history of the whole project.
You can visit the prototype by going to our website www.MTechnology.org and click on "M Portal Tour."
So far, we have converted in the old MTA FileManager Member, Mailing and "M Sources" databases into a Caché WebLink database which is now up on the portal. You can type in anyone's name, Co., zip code, or the E-mail address, and see all the matches from our 10,000 + M company database. Shortly, the same functionality, will enable you to manage your own "Members page", to keep your own information up-to-date, enter your own preferences, and register for services. (As in the past, members who wish to keep their information private can click on a "Do Not Publish" checkbox, and their information won’t be available to the public.
The other two avenues we have working, are the online tutorial section, and the searchable knowledge base. We’ve converted a public domain MUMPS learning system, originally written in MUMPS into Caché WebLink application. This is an amazing piece of software, it's actually way I originally learned to program in MUMPS 15 years ago. Employers will be able to train employees using this system. Our next project will be to write a tutorial-giver, so that people who gave tutorials, or would like to give tutorials in future conferences, will be able to give them on-line. Later versions will involve audio and live video as well.
We also have a functioning, searchable Knowledge-base. It is a place like comp.lang.mumps where you can ask, answer or comment on MUMPS topics. The difference is that the MTA's Knowledge-base is hierarchical, divided into topics and organized into discussions. You can either use the search function to find anything you are looking for, or you can set your Member's Page up to have the system tell you when your question has been answered. In the near future the portal will be able to email you if you request "Push technology", or the next time you sign on to the portal, you'll see a list of all the questions you answered, asked, or commented on, or marked as being of interest to you to. All new entries will be listed as hypertext links on your Personal Portal page.
The same Push/Pull technology will be available for every function of the MTA portal. You can ask for an alert:
In our job search area, you can store your criteria for a job you might be interested in, and receive an alert whenever a job is listed that matches your criteria.
"M Computing" will also be in the Knowledge-base, and therefore searchable. Hopefully at some point, we'll find volunteers willing to help put up past versions of "M Computing", so that anything ever written in "M Computing" will be accessible. For new articles, because the format of the MTA's Knowledge-base is HTML, new articles will be able to include graphics, RealAudio, and even real video.
The entire MTA directory is already upon the web, so "M Sources" online will also be available. You will be able to keep the information about your products, services, and self up-to-date.
Even if you do not know Caché WebLink, you can still go to our web portal and find a whole page of suggestions about how you can help, along with a form that you can fill out to volunteer. Non-WebLink tasks include:
The simple answer is the same as it was way back when I bought my first Macintosh SE;
We have plans to put up a chat room on our web portal, so if you slam up against one of those Technological walls, and don't know where to turn, you can just logon to www.MTechnology.org and see if an answer is available right now in our chat room.
Or you can log your question into our Knowledge-base, and be alerted when your answer arrives. Or you can use one of our fee-for-services and ask one of the experts that we hope to have registered with our system.
The MTA and the MTA portal are our attempt to respond to the changing times by creating an automated user group which hopefully will be even better than the "good old days Wanna help?. Why don't you sign on see what we've done for you this week?
Max Rivers has been CEO and head programmer of M Rivers Consulting in Shutesbury MA for over 15 years. He is on the Board of Directors of the M Technology Association. He can be reached via email at: maxrivers@aol.com, or through his website: http://members.aol.com/maxrivers.