The
second meeting of the TabletPC User Group was held last night and was a great
success.
About
26 attendees gathered at Gen-i's Wellington office at 6PM.
After
a quick welcome Damien Toman of Gen-i
gave a great presentation about enterprise mobility. Damien was true to
his word and did not use a single PowerPoint slide. Instead he opted to use
Journal on his tablet, plugged into a projector to build a network diagram.
Damien talked through some of the challenges organizations are facing and added
components to his diagram and explained how these address the issues.
Ian Westlake
from Toshiba then took the floor. Toshiba brought with them five M200s
and these were distributed to five people in the audience so that they (and
anyone else who had their own). Ian covered off the basics of Tablet
usage, the TIP, Windows Journal, the TabletPC
Experience Pack and the Education
Pack for Tablet PC. In addition Ian talked about some of the Toshiba
specific features including the supported gestures, their quick menu and the
wireless configuration suite ConfigFree. I asked the question posed by
Loren Heiny – “Is there going
to be a newer version of the M200?” The answer – there have
been several updates to the original M200, but the next full refresh is not
expected until next year when the dual core processors are available.
I was
then lucky enough to be able to demonstrate to the group some of the new
features coming in MindJet’s
MindManager 6, which is due to release on Sept. 20th. I
used Release Candidate 1, which I had only received that afternoon! Everything
I discussed was under embargo until that very day so it was a really fresh demo.
I showed the group the new ink enabled notes entry and the one step export to
PowerPoint. Very cool. On a dare I demonstrated the new export to
Visio feature which I had not tried (what the heck – I’m brave) and
the demo gods smiled on me because it just worked. I also talked about
the new ink enabled and editable outline view which is another great feature.
We
finished off with a couple of prize draws and a bit of a chat over beer and
pizza. The audience was diverse. We had levels of expertise ranging
from IT pros to people who had never even seen a Tablet PC before. We
were graced by the presence of one of Rob
Bushway’s rock stars of Tablet PC development – Orange Guava Desktop.
We even had one user who came all the way from Palmerston North –a psychiatrist that
uses his Toshiba M4 in his practice.
Overall
it was a great night and I’m sure I’m not the only one looking
forward to the next one, which will be in November. There are so many
topics we can talk about. Stay tuned!