Thursday, July 30th, 1998

To All:

Post-mortems of meetings will Not be a regular occurrence, however the significance of what was accomplished at the first meeting is such that I believe this message is warranted.

- We had ~40 attendees! Not bad when I only had an Email list of ~50 names at the time. MS has told me that they will have their local MS Sales Reps tell their corporate clients about our group . . . that could greatly enlarge our group and attendance!

- We chose the formal name of "Windows Technical Forum". Thanks goes to Barbara Welther for the suggestion.

- The August 17th meeting will have a Technical Topic of "SpinRite 5", a HDD disaster recovery (and prevention) tool by Gibson Research. Four of us who are testing the product will give an unbiased <vbg> opinion of the product and its capabilities in practical application.

- We have the start of a Website at www.webss.com/wintech. It needs lots of work to be what we want it to be, but the start (and hosting) was done by Rick Zach, President of MetroWest Services, Inc. in Framingham (and Chair of the FrontPage User Group). Many thanks! [Please send any ideas for the

Website to me, see Email address below.]

- A few have suggested another meeting night (such as 3rd Wednesday), however MS' rooms are in use almost every night of the month with User Group meetings. The 3rd Wednesday (if my fuzzy memory is correct) is the night that a huge MS Access Developers Group meets. [For now, we will be meeting

on the 3rd Monday of each month, with an exception for September this year (3rd Wednesday) due to conflict with Jewish New Year.]

- Topics for future meetings were suggested as follows:

* RAS in/RAS out

* Exchange with Office, NT Server and Win9x Clients for shared calendars

* MS Certification Issues and Tips

* Tools in Win98 and NT Resource Kit for Troubleshooting (e.g. dll update, FAT32 conversion, MS Info, etc.)

* Mini-Presentations on "Things Learned" in Real World applications

* SID Changing, Large-Scale Migration Tools

* New Technologies Expected in Next Quarter (e.g. Celerons, USB Hardware, 100MHz Bus Socket 7 motherboards, etc.)

* Seagate Exec Backup - Restoring from Floppy

* RAID - Explaining RAID 0-5, When/why to use it and which Level, etc. 

* Small Business Server Market Issues (e.g. From a Practical Point of View, what do you do if you outgrow SBS and want to upgrade to full-blown products <g>?)

* Registry Backups in Win98 (e.g. How it works, what's different from Win95, practical issues, etc.)

- We have a volunteer for Treasurer (Bruce Vega . . . many thanks!), and we have 3-4 others who have also volunteered to help out. I will be working with these people to define roles for each of us.

- Things we need to do within the next few weeks:

* Ideas for a "Logo"?

* Talk with IRS to see how we can run the organization and collect dues with minimal cost/hassle. Do we need to file for 501c3 status (Charitable organization)? Do we need to incorporate? What will the costs for doing this amount to (upfront and ongoing)? We have at least one person on this list who has gone through this process recently (Hi Don <g>) and perhaps he can also provide us some practical information about this process?

* Decide the order for the suggested topics, get speakers (either internal to group or from outside), and match topics to meeting dates.

If anyone can speak about any of the topics listed above, please contact me via Email? [Rather than having a lot of "marketing" presentations, I think that we will learn more from speakers who have personal knowledge about the topics (and often the bruises to show for it!). We will have some commercial speakers, but in another "high end group" that I ran, I found that it was much more effective to have speakers who had "nothing to sell".]

Remember, everyone can bring tips and tricks, as well as problems and solutions for those portions of each meeting.

Regards,

Len Segal, MCP

Segal Computer Consulting