At the heart of the Las Vegas strip, a group of HP 3000 customers are placing a sure bet. They’re wagering that three days spent in this town of chance will help their careers and their organizations. One of the oldest HP 3000 application providers is paying off, hosting an application users conference.

In this modest hotel/casino’s meeting room, the e3000 community is advancing. Idaho Computer Services (ICS) has called customers to its annual user group meeting in the Imperial Palace, the tenth straight meeting in the 25-year history of ICS. The cities, counties and schools which use ICS software have sent the front-line citizens of the e3000 community: people who IT managers call end-users.

Today’s discussions are about the ICS financials programs: when the advances in the applications will be ready, how many are still outstanding, and what the customers want to put on the to-do list for the year to come. ICS engineers like Ben Pratt are listening as the users of applications ask for updates to reports and fixes for processes.

This customer, a services director for a county, is going over a report from the ICS application. She’s got specific suggestions on how it could be more useful to her, and Pratt takes notes. ICS fine-tunes much of its software for its customers, and sometimes the changes carry a cost if they’re so specific few other cities could use them.

“Be sure to tell me how much these will be before you do them,” the director tells Pratt. The talk then shifts to personnel changes in her organization, and several other attendees chat with her like they’re catching up on family members.

While the 3000’s calendar has long been dominated by the IT-focused meetings of Regional User Groups, MIS management at HP World and technical nuances in Special Interest Groups, there’s another level of exchange with a long tradition in the community. These are the meetings wrapped around the applications for the platform. At these kinds of conferences, attendees are more likely to call the system “the HP” when they refer to the computer at all. Frequently, they aren’t sure which model of e3000 is doing the job for them.

It rarely matters, either. Users like the ones meeting in this hotel in the heart of the Vegas strip have much more important information to exchange. The national user meeting for ICS gathers people with more in common than just the company’s products. Many attendees are doing the same kind of job for the municipal entities and educational institutions, and they’re sharing tips about how to share the information in their e3000s. Details like how to generate reports which will satisfy local banks come up, nuances that surface far more often than talk of the latest e3000 Web development tool, or which patch includes new storage commands.

Attendees like Jan Hutton are typical at an application vendor’s meeting like the ICS NUG. The Director of Business Services for the Central Valley School District in Greenacres, Wash., she’s getting ready to pilot the new user interface for the ICS software her district employees use. Hutton is getting a closer look at what the new Visual Basic interface will do to improve the usability of applications.

“We’re gathering some of our users together to help us customize the plans for what we’re going to use as pull-down menus,” Hutton said. “The implementation date is set for August, the beginning of the next school year.”

Her 10,300-student school district has moved to the ICS application after 15 years of service from another, older application. When the district evaluated a better-looking alternative that called for a server at each site in the district, the price tag “was a real drain on our budget, about $200,000 a year. In this day and age there isn’t an extra $200,000 in resources,” Hutton said.

The ICS applications are getting graphical interfaces for Windows PCs this year, and Hutton is at the meeting to provide input on how the interface would best serve her employees. These are clerical staff, counselors, and assistant principals responsible for disciplinary activity.

The most important goal for Hutton in being at the ICS meeting is “Networking. There’s a lot of value and added worth in being able to network with people and get to know people from other school districts in the state of Washington. We talk about how they use the software for applications and how we use it, and find the best of both worlds.”

This level of exchange, with many of the attendees coming from the Pacific Northwest region, makes meetings of application vendors part reunion and part celebration. ICS users are encouraged to bring a present for a gift exchange, a tradition where the gifts brag on the best a small city or a remote county has to offer.

ICS promotes this family feeling in its opening remarks, offered in the same room where a continental breakfast is served. “The user group meeting has always been home-town, family,” marketing director Brian Matsuoka says on the first day. “If you’re not quite feeling that way yet, my mission is that you do feel that way when you’re getting ready to go home.”

The software vendor is strutting its latest stuff at the meeting, much like any vendor would at any conference. ICS is proud of its overhaul of applications like general ledger, accounts payable, fixed assets and human resources. The graphical interfaces are “a new dawning” for ICS, managing partner Phil Jones tells the attendees.

The new look for the apps is a result of a new partnership with Bradmark and the work of Robust Systems, whose VB-View toolkit transformed the VPlus programs. ICS also got help from HP to put on the meeting — funding to help ICS throw a barbecue dinner at a local ranch. The e3000 division (CSY) is putting its marketing support out in this kind of application community, a place where CSY believes new systems get sold.

“We’re pleased to support and be a part of this venue,” said Christine Martino, the worldwide marketing manager for the e3000. “This conference provides users with the opportunity to interact with their peers, as well as the partners that supply their total solution. This interaction really helps to build a community around the application, which truly enhances customer satisfaction.”

ICS confirms that attendees at its user conference talk afterward with colleagues in neighboring cities and entities about their solutions on the HP systems. This kind of word-of-mouth reference opens doors for the system. Once the user base got to a critical mass of about 50 or more, ICS began hosting the meetings.

Some attendees look forward to the meeting as a chance to get new features created without any extra charge. Harvey Wilds, Director of Finance at New Mexico Tech University, says his goal is getting other customers’ support for enhancement requests.

“I usually come here to do a little politicking to get some things I need done free,” Wilds says. “I’ve got some gripes, and if enough people have the same gripe, they decide it’s a customer complaint and fix it for nothing.” He says he orders special programs from ICS several times a year, and uses the meeting to confer with the programmers doing the work.

Wilds said he likes the access in working with a company the size of ICS, which has about 200 customers. “We work with other vendors, and you can hardly get them on the phone,” he says. One of Wilds’ other vendors, Banner/SCT, is having a user group conference the same week as the ICS meeting, “and they’ve got 12,000 people there.” About 70 users of ICS software are in Las Vegas for this meeting, making the level of exchanges personal and immediate.

The users also attend as a way to reconnect with colleagues. Diana Vaughn, Assistant Director of Central Services for Island County in Washington state, has been to every ICS conference. The meetings began in the ICS headquarters of Twin Falls, Idaho, and then moved to Jackpot, Nevada for a few years.

“You get more out of talking with the other users here than by just calling the programmers,” Vaughn says. Her county, which covers two islands in Puget Sound, has been using ICS software since 1985 to manage finances, payroll and vehicle maintenance. Vaughn is also trying to convince other users to ask for the same changes she needs in the ICS applications. “If they want the same change as you do, then [ICS] does it for free. It might be something somebody else wants.”

The director says she’s glad her applications are getting Windows interfaces, to help preserve the e3000’s place in the organization. A more modern interface helps the system’s status. “It’s been a workhorse, a wonderful machine,” Vaughn says of her server, which she identifies as a Series 937 supporting 35 users. “I don’t ever have to do anything with it — I love it.”

Vaughn says, “I always learn from these guys, just by watching them or asking questions. They’re very good at explaining things. I always find something new to do with W-2s, and then I get to see if the county can take advantage of it.”

A cut in funding at her county has made her attendance more crucial this year. Instead of sending six employees to the conference, only Vaughn is attending this year. She’s more technical than some users in attendance today, talking about using Lund Performance Systems’ SOS to manage 3000 performance and adjust queue priorities. Vaughn also does all the county’s reporting management with the DataNow! utility that ICS offers. Two different levels of DataNow! training are part of the conference, plus a DataNow! roundtable to discuss enhances and bug fixes.

The ICS conference is the only e3000-related meeting Vaughn attends each year. She used to attend a regional user group meeting in Seattle, “but it got to be really big sites there, and the little guys just got lost in the mix, so I quit going.”

Modest shops from small-town locales are a big part of an ICS user group meeting. Don Knight works in the City of Safford, Ariz, a community of 10,000 where he’s listed as the MIS Supervisor. But his responsibilities include database management and reporting, after starting with the city as its finance director. “I work for the guy I hired as one of our accountants,” he says.