The conference season is upon us once again and in the coming months British Power i fans will be spoilt for choice with events from the Northern iSeries Users Group (NiSUG) and Common UK.

As iNEWSWire UK went to press, it was confirmed that NiSUG has teamed up once again with System iNetwork to put together Power Shift, a one-day conference which will be held at the City Of Manchester Stadium on April 22. In the meantime, the Common UK user group will be holding a one-day event of its own called Back To Basics at IBM's London South Bank site next week on St Patrick's Day. Common UK has also issued a call for papers for the Common Europe Congress which it is hosting this year in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The timing of the joint NiSUG/System iNetwork Power Shift event couldn't be better. This week, Big Blue revealed that it will be making its new IBM i 7.1 operating system announcements on April 14. This means that Power Shift will present the first chance for UK i users to hear about the goodies included in the new OS first-hand. Confirmed speakers so far include dynamic development duo Jon Paris and Susan Gantner, unified communications expert John Taylor and IBM's Bob Thornley.

As regular iNEWSWire UK readers may be aware, the Power Shift event's venue is home to what this correspondent believes to be God's Own Football Team. In fact, Manchester City runs its whole ticketing and CRM operation on the Power i-based Talent solution from Iris and the club's IT manager, Andy Hughes, will be presenting a session on his experiences with the platform. More speakers are expected to be confirmed in the next week or so and iNEWSWire UK will be keeping readers informed about additions to the line-up.

Admission prices are £90 + VAT for non-NiSUG members and £45 + VAT for members. For booking and more info, see the Power Shift website.

Common UK's Back to Basics event on March 17 features an interesting mix of speakers that will be there in-person and presenters that will appear via live video feed. Experts include BI specialist Steve Finnes and DB2 guru Tom McKinley from IBM Rochester, midrange speaker circuit mainstay Paul Tuohy on RPG enhancements from V5R4 onwards and XML for RPG-heads, and Andrew Ireland who will be talking about DB2 Web Query.

Fees are £49 + VAT for Common UK members and £99 + VAT for non-members. More lowdown can be found at the IBM CUA website where you can also find the initial details about this year's Common Europe Congress, which Common UK is hosting in Stratford upon Avon from June 12-15.