[Wylug-discuss] November Meeting and Future Talks

[Mike Goodman]

Dave Fisher wrote:

> If you think that you could give even a very short introductory talk
> on any of
> these topics for November, please let me know immediately.

Or, how about a practical exercise? What I have in mind as a starter is
many members are either self-employed or run small businesses. I've been
thinking for some time about logging everything and putting all the
relevant bits through the accounts system and using the rest for
monitoring and planning purposes. So we'd end up with an OS (or a couple
of alternative OS) business management system using a sensible
combination of software on the greatest platform on earth. The sequence
should be something like:

1. Enquiry in (phone, email, fax, site response) - where/how to log it?
(plenty of options).

2. Response to enquiry - where to log it?.

3. Enquiry firms up - action points and where to log them?
   or, nothing happens - how to deal with this situation, to leave, file
elsewhere or delete? (depends on business type, discussion of
possibilities would be useful) .

4. Confirmation, contractual or similar documentation.

5. Project management documentation if necessary.

6. Invoicing/Payment/Receipt documents and feed figures into management
and P&L accounts.

I'd be happy to lead a discussion to start the ball rolling, which
should take rather more than the first ten minutes if there's enough
interest. Participants could help by stating reasons why they prefer or
recommend a particular method to handle any stages, and why one or
another database should be the driver.

There must be a dozen or more other projects which would tease out where
people are using the software in everyday terms, where the gaps are, if
any, hence where the expertise lies to develop some future themes?

> I do have a couple of arm-twisted offers to talk about mutt and pine
> respectively.  
> 
> It would be really good if we could turn this into a comparative
> session on
> email clients with 10 minutes each on Evolution, Thunderbird, Pine,
> Mutt,
> Squirrelmail, OpenWebMail, etc.

This would be great as far as I'm concerned. I'm no expert so not sure
what I could contribute. I use Evolution on a daily basis but almost
exclusively as an email client. Prepared to give it a bash if you're
desperate!

Mike Goodman