Returning to speak at an OCCA for the third time in four years, Ben Lee has been an excellent speaker, highly reviewed by our members.

Join Ben Lee III from Intel to learn about the many new changes in hardware design that are taking place in desktop, laptop and server computing. This will be an interactive session with questions encouraged from the audience.

We will be talking about new platform innovations such as dual- and quad-core processors for desktop, mobile, and server. He will also talk about improvements in reducing power consumption to save money, virtualization, and Intel vPro Technologies for enhanced remote IT management and security.

Ben will cover processor, chipset and the associated technologies along with trends in the industry like the transition to mobile computing.

Ben H. Lee III is an Intel Field Sales Engineer located in Beaverton, Oregon. He covers the Northern Midwest Territory of the US and responsible for $27M in annual revenue.

He started working at Intel in 1996, and held various positions in engineering for desktop and networking products. He went on to marketing in 2000, and started in Sales in 2004. Ben holds one patent in adaptive synchronization of data across networks.
 

The ASUS EEE PC is a sub-subnotebook computer designed by ASUS and Intel, noted for its combination of very light weight, small size, solid-state drive and $399 price. It weighs less than 2 pounds, has an 800x480 screen, boots and connects to Wi-Fi while a normal notebook would still be loading Windows, and provides 3 USB ports, an SD slot and a
reasonable Qwerty keyboard. It comes with Antivirus, Firefox, Open Office and much more pre-installed software, making it an appliance type Linux computer.

CNet summarized: "For less than $400, the Asus EEE PC offers an impressive package for portable Web surfing and basic productivity, as long as you keep expectations tempered. The incredibly approachable price outweighs any shortcomings; it's a near perfect choice for a highly portable second or backup laptop."

After spending a couple weeks with an Evaluation unit, OCCA member Steve Shank has a lot to say about the pluses and minuses of this unit and the various models available. He will also discuss what he sees as the market for it. The evaluation unit will be passed around for people to actually try out.

Mike Mahanay, Director of Marketing for CTL, along with Rachel Towner, Account Manager, will be presenting their plan for this product. CTL is currently working to take this base and provide a CTL branded version that will be competitively priced to sell.

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Member Scott Hendison introduces members to the functionality under the hood of the new OCCA  website.

What are some tax write-offs often overlooked by consultants?
What are some common mistakes often made on a consultant’s tax return?
What is the best way(s) to handle the home office deduction?
Why use a CPA when TurboTax does a good job?

Expect to hear the answers to these questions and more. The OCCA meeting on Jan 29 features Rick Leipzig, Rick is a CPA with 30 years of experience working with smaller businesses. He is experienced with the federal and Oregon taxation of individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts/estates as well as payroll tax reporting and retirement planning. He will also give us some insight into what 2008 tax law holds in store for us.

Social hour starts at 6:00, followed by dinner and the general meeting at 7:00 at the Rheinlander Restaurant (directions below).

Local retailer PC Club will be doing a presentation for computer consultants. discussing the difference and changes AMD and Intel are undergoing, and perhaps a future roadmap.

The speakers will be Jonas Fowler, and Jason Aeh from PC Club. Jonas is the District manager, and Jason is the Assistant Manager at the Tigard Oregon store.

While many consultants deal only with small businesses, PC club deals with retail consumers and knows what they are after, what they want, what some of their biggest problems are, and even more important, what they bring in computers for, and what they might dislike about their office IT people.

We hope you can attend!

We will discuss Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)2.0 and 3.0.

We will talk about the difference in versions, how to install 3.0 and keep 2.0 intact, what can be done with WSS to improve office productivity, how to load templates and put them to work. We will have live demonstrations of Sharepoint web parts in action. It is possible to also install WSS 3.0 and not break the applications and components that are dependent on WSS 2.0 by leaving it in place.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the solution platform for SharePoint Products and Technologies, delivering a wide range of functional capabilities that are expanded and extended by other SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Presented by
Tom Rich - Mt Hood Computer Services

Tom Rich is President of Mt. Hood Computer Services, Inc. in Portland Oregon. In business since 1998, we are a Microsoft Registered Partner and each tech is a Microsoft Small Business Specialist.

Apple has undergone drastic changes in the past five years. With a modern operating system and the recent transition to Intel-based hardware, the Apple platform has become much more interesting in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows.

Macintosh native applications, such as Microsoft Office, have allowed Apple users to easily exchange documents with Windows users for years. Now, the Mac provides several methods of running Windows or Linux applications with little impact on overall system performance. We will discuss several of these methods along with their respective advantages and disadvantages.

We will also briefly cover the improvements arriving in Apple s latest revision of its operating system, Mac OS X 10.5.

Presented by

Michael Lippold: President of Smartacus Inc.

Michael Lippold began working on large Apple networks more than ten years ago. Since then, he has worked on mixed-platform networks of all shapes and sizes. He frequently uses desktop and server versions of Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Apple Mac OS X. He started Smartacus Inc. in 2004 to assist businesses in cross-platform networking.

Join Scott Hanselman for a two part presentation:

First - Let go of the psychic weight of the 10000 emails in your Inboxand enjoy the bliss you can get with "zero email bounce." We'll talkabout what that is, and how you can implement it in your daily emailworkflow, in Outlook, or in Gmail and other clients.

Second - We'll talk about Windows Home Server. Scott's been betatesting WHS for the last 6 months and living with it day to day. We'llsee what it offers, if you should build or buy and what it providesover one of the off-the-shelf NAS solutions.

Presented by

Scott Hanselman

Scott Hanselman was the Chief architect for Corillian Corporation and aPrincipal Consultant at STEP Technology and has been in technology forthe last 15 years. He's written a number of books on .NET and Microsofttechnologies and has a popular blog at http://www.hanselman.com and aweekly podcast on iTunes and at http://www.hanselminutes.com. He'll bestarting a new job at Microsoft as a Program Manager in the DeveloperDivision this fall.

Every business has data and every business wants to be able to view that data in a concise, readable, and attractive format. In this presentation, Lis Baccigaluppi of Tech Know Solve will demonstrate the reporting capabilities of Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports, and SQL Server Reporting Services. Which tool you or your clients choose will depend on the resources available and the form of the data you wish to report on. Lis will discuss considerations to take into account when choosing a reporting tool. She will also talk about the pros and cons of each tool, demonstrate the bells and whistles that come with each one, and show how a simple report will look in each reporting application. If time allows, she will demonstrate how to build a simple report using each application.

Presented by

Lis Baccigaluppi

Lis Baccigaluppi is the President of TechKnowSolve which specializes in customized software, database, web, and reporting solutions. In addition to her consulting work for Tech Know Solve, Lis occasionally teaches computer programming and database classes for Portland Community College, including SQL Server Administration and ASP.NET programming. Lis holds several Microsoft certifications, including MOUSE (Microsoft Office User Expert), MCP, MCDBA, and MCSD.

We will be talking about how we bill and make money as consultants. Wewill discuss time and billing, tracking hours and time we spend withclients, invoicing clients and collecting payment, collections issuesand adding interest and late fees. We will also talk about contractssuch as payment arrangements, disclaimers, cancellation fees, andlength of contract.

Steve Shank of the OCCA will present his Time and Billing solutionbefore we have our mediated discussion. Bring your collections horrorstories, and ideas to be more organized in the way we make our money.

K.C. Courtnier is a certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor and a Certified QuickBooks Point of Sale ProAdvisor. Her company is 2nd Site Business Solutions. She will be discussing Quickbooks and how we can use its time, billing, and invoicing features.

Presented by

Steve Shank
K.C. Courtnier

Steve Shank started Oregon Computer Solutions nearly 25 years ago andfor more than 20 years has billed using Timeslips Time and BillingSoftware. During that time he has assisted over 100 local businesseswith their Time Billing.

K.C. Courtnier is a certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor, and a Certified QuickBooks Point of Sale ProAdvisor. Her company is 2nd Site Business Solutions. "Rescuing Quickbooks from abuse, misuse, and inexperience"

Make money, increase customer loyalty, reduce workload with Automated Vulnerability Assessment

Jesper "JJ" Jurcenoks will run an impressive Hacker Demo that will show you modern hacking techniques including Spear fishing, Buffer overflow hacking using Metasploit, hand executing SQL injection, all on a fully patched system, leading to extraction of sensitive information like Social Security Numbers etc.

JJ will then move on to explain the finer points and terminology of Vulnerability.

Jesper Jurcenoks will then explain how you can use Automated Vulnerability to strengthen your Customer Relationship.

Then stay around for a question and answer period on how specific implementations and for your free copy of netVigilances Software.

Presented by

Jesper

Jesper a.k.a. "JJ" is the Co-founder of netVigilance. Before founding netVigilance "JJ" Owned and Operated a successful ISP and Web-Hosting company, and ran a highly respected systems integration firm called"InterSpace" in Northern Europe for seven years. Prior to that, he wasa team leader and senior consultant for several multinational corporations including Minolta and Compaq Computers (Now Hewlet-Packard).In the late 1980's, JJ Pioneered the field of "Thin Clients" and Satellite emails from vessels in the Atlantic Ocean.