What's New?

The Recession

The World Wide Recession is clearly "What's New". I have already had two Natural classes canceled this year because the client companies IT departments had their budgets cut (actually, one IT department said their budget had been totally frozen). What to do? I am initiating two policies with regard to Natural classes.

Free Consulting Day

The first is a formal extension of a policy I have always followed. I have always told companies that I will look at problems they are having with code. This was usually done over sessions after class with programmers from the shop, followed by my looking at code in the evenings.

This will continue, and will be supplemented by a totally free day of consulting for every week's class. No more rushing through an after class session because people who commute have to catch a train, or beat the rush hour traffic.

Extended Payment Time

The second new policy is more drastic. Usually, a class is followed, within a week or so, by an invoice. Typically such invoices are paid within one "billing cycle" of the company. That means, based on when the invoice arrives relative to the billing cycle, anywhere from a week to six weeks until an invoice is paid. After eight weeks, I send out a reminder that the invoice is overdue.

That will now change. For the remainder of this year (by which time the world's economy will hopefully have recovered; okay, I have always been an optimist), there will be a four month "grace period" for all classes. After four months, there will be a "late fee" of five percent of the class cost (but not travel and expenses). After three more months, there would be an additional five percent assessed.

Hopefully this policy will permit shops to schedule classes based on future funds. Of course, if your company does have a budget, payment before four months will be GREATLY appreciated. Why do this? It is far better than the alternative, which is not teaching classes.

What else is New?

The second Worldwide Seminar Tour with Andreas Schuetz is being postponed. In the face of the declining world wide economy, putting together a class from many different companies has proven more challenging than presenting inhouse classes. The tour will hopefully resume late 2009 or at worst, early 2010.

For those of you who are reading about this tour for the first time, some background information. Andreas and I will be covering the Internals (mainly Andreas) and Externals (programming; mainly me) of Mainframe Natural 4 (with time alloted to discuss aspects of Version 3 that are not being widely used). We have been known to discuss PC Natural (Version 6) after class, especially over a beer (mainly Andreas) or a wine (mainly me).

Despite the postponement, if you would like to see such a class in your city, please contact us via one of the methods that are detailed on this page. It may well be that the right combination of companies, city and timing can overcome the prevailing budget constraints.

The second item in "What else is new" is actually two items. Version 4 (mainframe) and Version 6 (Open Systems) have been in the field for quite awhile now. However, many shops are not taking advantage of the new facilities available in these releases. I have developed materials for the new versions and they have been integrated within all my inhouse classes (intro through advanced). Since all my classes are customized to your needs, please contact me so we can discuss your requirements.

Of particular note is the Natural Masters class which includes discussions of three main topics:
(1) All the new Version 4 material (facilities, options, etc.).
(2) Performance, which covers a wide variety of subjects, and overlaps quite a bit with the Version 4 material (e.g. MultiFetch)
(3) Other topics from Version 3 and earlier that are not as widely used as they should be (e.g. screen scraping, the recorder, etc).

The third item in this heading is the release of the Browser front end for Simply Natural. A Demo of Simply Natural's Browser front end will give you an understanding of the new browser front end, and will also demonstrate the depth of information available in Simply Natural.