It was a fantastic weekend here in Minneapolis, and certainly one of celebration! Good Friday through Easter Sunday is one of the highlights of the Christian calendar, but even if you have different beliefs, perhaps there were still chocolate eggs and bags of candy to enjoy, not to mention an absolutely glorious sunny and warm spring weekend—something Midwesterners are so incredibly ready for!

I spent the weekend with a couple of close friends and my two teenage kids, Jordan and Sydney, and we had a wonderful time out enjoying the sunshine, picnicking at a local park, riding some hair-raising rides at the (in)famous Mall of America, and paying a visit to the beautiful Minnehaha_Falls. Although not quite as dramatic as the other two spectacular falls I have been fortunate to see this year in Niagara and Portland, this waterfall is a favorite attraction for visitors to Minneapolis, and is situated in a beautiful park close the Minneapolis International airport.

This week is going to pass quickly, as we are busy preparing for the PowerTech Advisory Board, a consortium of large customers who will be converging on our corporate offices in Eden Prairie next week. The purpose of this session is to share strategic direction on PowerTech product development, as well as garner opinions and insight into the future security and compliance needs of our customers. We also conduct these sessions with the assistance of Help/Systems’ Robot customers, and always find them extremely beneficial in helping define needs, and to ensure that we continue to meet (and hopefully exceed) the high expectations that our customers have.

We are reeling a little from the fevered interest we have been receiving for the updated 2010 “State of IBM i Security” released last week. I conducted a Webinar with Jill Martin—who did much of the work around the updated copy—on the day we published it, and were subsequently inundated with requests for copies of the study. We also received a wealth of interest in the use of our free assessment tool that (optionally) provides the data used in the report each year. Go to www.powertech.com for access to the full study, and to register for your own free system review using our Compliance Assessment tool.

I will also be teaching the PowerTech security workshop with local partner MSI Systems Integrators here in Bloomington. This is the last scheduled session, although we are discussing Chicago and Dallas as possible future host cities. If you think that you are in a geography that we should be visiting, send me a note at robin.tatam@powertech.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Have a wonderful week!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under Other, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.