This month is a social gathering with your favorite techies! No board meeting, no formal presentation, just join us for dinner and join in the conversation.

The topic we were hoping to get for this month fell through. Our default fall-back plan is to discuss the latest gadgets or apps we may have found or issues we all face as we support our clients.

Tonight the OCCA will meet at Buffalo Gap for an extended networking dinner and Stump the Geek.  Come out and join us for tech talk & grub!

This month Justin Swall and Christan Martin will be doing a deep dive into Professional Service Automation tools for the IT Service Provider.

Known simply as PSAs in the industry, these tools give your business one place to manage the client experience including Service Requests, Project Management, Time Tracking, Billing, and Financial Reporting while also syncing to most major accounting packages such as QuickBooks and Xero.  Many also include Marketing, Procurement, and Sales Opportunity tracking as well.

Justin Swall of West Coast Technology Guides and Christian Martin of Denali Consulting will show you how they use these tools to manage their business, get more done, and bill accurately

PSA tools covered will include:

• Autotask
• ConnectWise PSA (formally ConnectWise Manage)
• Nilear OS (MTX Add-On for ConnectWise Manage)
• Syncro MSP

Dinner will be provided for OCCA members attending this month's meeting beginning at 6:15 pm.

If able, please RSVP on Meetup.com so we have an accurate headcount for dinner.  Thanks!

As this meeting will include a live demonstration of these tools in a production environment, this meeting is for OCCA members and their invited guests only. If you would like to attend and are not yet an OCCA member, please reach out to an existing member to sponsor your attendance of this meeting.

The next meeting will be on January 31, 2023. Come meet the new president of our organization and participate in discussions about all things technical!

Join us for our All-Member Annual Meeting for pizza, camaraderie, and Board Member elections!

If you would be interested in helping to shape the future of the OCCA, consider joining the board of directors.  With a minimal time investment of fewer than 2 hours a month (one hour via Zoom for the official Board Meeting and a few email threads between meetings), you can be a part of helping to sustain one of the longest-running computer consultant associations! (see more here)

If you are interested, please join us for our annual meeting on Tuesday, November 29th at 6pm at the Round Table Pizza in Lake Oswego.  We will be voting on board members and the 2023 Board President during this meeting.  If you would like to be considered for nomination to the Board of Directors but cannot attend this meeting in person, please let me know at president [at] occa [dot] org, and I'll be sure your name is on the ballot.

I hope to see you all there!

You're one day into your well-deserved vacation, and you've just got the text message that a critical-use desktop won't boot at your most important client's office. They apologize profusely knowing that this is your first vacation in years, but they can't afford to be down and need your immediate help.

You try to talk to the client over the phone, but they are useless in explaining what's on their screen:

It's an error.
It won't boot.
It's a blue screen.
... now a black screen.
... and now a white screen???

You can't fathom what they are attempting to describe.  You try to get them to video chat with you so you can see their screen, but they don't know how to "use the FaceTimes."  There's suddenly a sinking feeling in your chest as you feel your vacation (and your soul) slowy slipping away. This will require an on-site visit.

Or will it?

Does the story of our IT Hero depicted above sound all too familiar? Then join us on Tuesday, October 25th, 2022, at 6:30 pm for a deep dive into the free, open-source, and completely self-hosted remote support tool - MeshCentral. Written entirely in JavaScript, this extensible tool has agents for supporting Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android devices and can likely replace the TeamViewer / LogMeIn / Splashtop you're probably already using in your business today.

Oh, and did I forget to mention it also supports HARDWARE-LEVEL remote access to vPro-enabled Intel Servers AND Desktops?!?

In this month's meeting you will learn:

• What MeshCentral is, who maintains it, and the fundamental basics of its technology.
• What features it supports as it compares to other popular remote support utilities.
• How MeshCentral saved our IT Hero's vacation and allowed them to restore that critical-use PC from backups in just minutes from their hotel room, even though the machine couldn't boot to an OS.
• How to set up your very own MeshCentral Server as we will be walking through setting up a brand new instance, step-by-step, LIVE for the last part of the meeting.

This is a meeting you won't want to miss.

This will be an informal meeting of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association. No presentation is planned. We'll have plenty of time for Gadget Minute, Stump the Geek, extended discussion of what's new in the computing field, and other matters of interest to computer consultants. 

Visitors are welcome. 

There is no cost to attend, but the brewpub would appreciate your business :-) 

We will have a general Q&A Session, otherwise known as Stump-the-Geek. Bring your technical questions and we'll try to solve them collectively.

This will be an informal meeting of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association. No presentation is planned. We'll have plenty of time for Gadget Minute, Stump the Geek, extended discussion of what's new in the computing field, and other matters of interest to computer consultants. 

Visitors are welcome. 

There is no cost to attend, but the brewpub would appreciate your business :-)