July 2009

Written by Bayle Emlein

July 10, 2009

The meeting was called to order at 7:44 P.M. by President Chuck Horner. He welcomed five new members. Miguel found out about PCC from Mike Wong, as did Ricardo. Joel is a friend of Chuck’s. Wendy came with Joel. Linda is a friend of Bayle Emlein.

The Clubhouse will be open tomorrow and there will be a cookout.

Sally Holt has a 7-week-old yellow lab puppy. She also sends very cool jokes to Chuck.

SIG Announcements:

Bud Gallagher announced that the Windows 7 SIG will meet on July 11 at 1:00 P.M. Microsoft has a Windows 7 pre-sale offer that expires tomorrow. It can be ordered from Newegg, Amazon, Costco, etc. There is a rumor of a family pack that is likely to have 3 licenses. Windows 7 will be released to manufacturing on July 13th.

Jan Fagerholm reminded the group that the Spectacular Linux SIG will meet on the last Saturday of the month, the 25th in July. They will be looking at GIMP, the Linux graphics editor.

There will be a Hardware SIG tomorrow night. Bring hardware problems. Check the phone number in the newsletter if you need directions.

Other Announcements:

Elsie Smith reminded the attendees that O’Reilly Media will send any books we request to be door prizes. Elsie asked members to check the O’Reilly site and let her know what books they’d like to have sent. There’s always the chance that the requester will win his/her choice in the door prize drawing. If there is an O’Reilly book that you’d like to review, contact Elsie. Once the review is complete and submitted, the book is yours for no cost beyond the work of writing the review.

Presentation:

Hendra Halim-Tambunan of BoxConsulting.com spoke about Zoho and Software-as-a-Service. Many Zoho applications are free; a few—especially business apps- -have a charge in the range of $5 per month. Zoho is intentionally going after the Google Apps market.

Users can share and collaborate on documents written in Zoho applications. Free applications include Mail, Writer, Sheet, Show, Docs, Notebook, Wiki, Share, Planner, Chat.

Small business applications include Zoho CRM, Zoho Meeting (which is free with 1 user--useful for remote desktop support). Zoho Creator is an alternate to Access databases. Other Zoho business applications are Invoice, Projects, Reports, People, Business (which compares to Google Apps), and Marketplace where users can offer their applications for sale and check for new tools to buy.

Being browser-based, Zoho works equally well on Windows and Mac platforms. The word processor uses many of the same conventions that Word uses, reducing the learning curve.

The speed of cloud computing depends on the power of the server behind it as well as the connection to the Internet.

Hendra has not seen any slowing during business hours.

Sofware-as-a-Service addresses the upgrade issue automatically. Zoho will add functionality, but maintains backward compatibility and does not drop features.

After the Break:

Chuck has a list of the e-mails of about 600 volunteers. He gets lots of bounces when he sends out notices so he’s looking forward Zoho’s solution to this problem.

Elsie thanked Michael Wong for distributing Newsletters at the Livermore Veterans Hospital as well as distributing and talking with people at the San Leandro Cherry Festival. Several new members joined as a result.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:15 P.M.

The next meeting will take place at the same location on August 7, 2009.

Respectfully submitted,

Bayle Emlein, Secretary