Meeting Preview: Tampa Police Department members will describe their program of distributing used computers. Additionally, they will discuss computer security. As usual, Mary Sheridan will conduct a computing and Windows discussion for the first 30 minutes of the meeting.

June 13^th will be our first meeting in the Jan Platt Library. The meeting will begin at 6:30 PM. It is a very nice meeting room, and I’m hopeful we may be able to increase our membership because of the move. Anyone who has friends in that part of town, please encourage them to join us at our new location.

The meeting on May 9^th was very interesting. It was technical, but everyone seemed to be intrigued and reacted with enthusiasm to the speaker. He was very knowledgeable and answered all questions with ease.

Here’s a second reminder, that our July meeting will be July 12^th instead of Wednesday the 11^th. The library wasn’t available on Wednesday, and luckily Bruce Register was able to change his scheduled presentation to the 12^th. I hope this doesn’t present a hardship for anyone. It was the only reasonable way to work out the problem.

Today I attended the Developer’s Launch of Microsoft Office XP (for experience, they said.) The event was held at the Clearwater Harborview Center in Clearwater, FL. The suite of programs includes Microsoft Word Version 2002, Microsoft Excel Version 2002, Microsoft Outlook Version 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint Version 2002, Microsoft FrontPage Version 2002, Microsoft Access Version 2002, and Microsoft Publisher Version 2002. Microsoft is working on integrating their products with all kinds of handhelds and portable devices.

The presenter at the launch said there are 250 million Microsoft Office users in the world today. He also noted that 90% of all PC users have Microsoft Office. I thought this was surprising and didn’t realize how widespread the use of this product had become.

There were additional products being promoted at the launch. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server was one. This program enables collaboration over the Internet and intranets. The functions of this program were many and it seemed to be a "must have" for business teams. Other products were Microsoft Visio Version 2002, and SharePoint Team Services. You can get more information about any of these products at Microsoft.com/office.

For those who like free stuff, there was a nice ballpoint pen, a copy of MapPoint Version 2002, a 30-day trial of Microsoft Visio Standard, a 120 day evaluation copy of SharePoint Portal Server 2001, and a Microsoft Office XP Title Sampler.

We arrived too early, at 8:45 AM. The event didn’t start until 10 AM and was over at 3 PM. We had a very nice box lunch with turkey or ham sandwiches, potato chips, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, cookies and an apple. It was a long day, but as a learning experience, it was time well spent. At least it made my column longer than it would have been otherwise.

Happy computing! u