The Booking Process
I would first like to explain a little about the booking process. The Program Coordinator, Milt Hull, is responsible for arranging the speakers for our group. The Meeting Coordinator-that's me-continues to communicate with the speaker through the meeting night. In reality, Milt and I work closely and share the booking and communications tasks.
Generally, we try to book speakers many months in advance so that we can announce upcoming meetings. The downside to this advance booking is cancellations. The more time between the booking and presentation, the greater the odds of a cancellation. For this reason, we rarely book a speaker more than six months in advance.
Cancellations occur when the planned product is not completed in time or, more often than I want to admit, the person that we booked for a meeting leaves his job and does not tell anyone about our booking. When we finally find a new contact, they do not have anyone available to come to our meeting. We have also gotten cancellations because the company policy regarding user-group presentations changes. Sometimes they send us giveaways to make up for canceling but it still puts us in panic mode to find a replacement.
In the old days, it was easy to get speakers. They used to call us asking for the next available opening. We still get a few of these but in most cases the computer companies do not have a budget for field trips to user groups. We are always looking for new companies that are hungry for new users that think that user groups are important.
We get many of our meeting ideas from trade shows and magazines. Milt and I have also scanned the software sold at the computer stores to come up with a list of potential speakers.
We may also find a new product at a trade show, though it may not be at the stores yet. We also take input from you folks out there, so drop either of us an e-mail if you have a suggestion (see the inside back cover of Sacra Blue for contact information).
October
Jim Louderback is coming to talk about the latest in computer technologies. You can see Jim almost every day in one of his appearances on ZDTV's Fresh Gear. He serves as technical director for the network as well as the host of the weekly program "Fresh Gear". On "Fresh Gear," Jim gets to play with all on the newest hardware and software. We can not be sure what he will talk about, but it is sure to be interesting.
We tried to book Jim earlier in the year but his wife was having a baby. Now that both he and the baby are sleeping through the night, he is able to join us.
Paul Plitzuweit of WildFile, Inc. will be showing us how to protect your system with GoBack. This program keeps track of changes made to your system in the last 10 days and can set your hard drive back to any day within this time span to let you go back to when it worked.
I think this a great product idea and one that will solve many of the problems encountered by Windows users. Most problems seem to occur right after installing some great new program. Unfortunately, uninstalling the program often does not fix the problem. With GoBack, you can restore your system so that everything is just the way it was before you installed the offending system. GoBack uses about 10 percent of your hard drive to store all of this information, but I can live with that, with the low cost of hard drives these days.
