The weather today became a storm of the decade, the storm of 2019. And individually I think we all decided that tonight’s EPCUG meeting was canceled.
But with all the snow and power outages eventually I got to thinking about other things. Something I’d seen in the news recently. A company called Zoom that was going public soon and worth billions of dollars, and I never heard of it. I Googled it and found it was a conferencing program and it could be used by two people at once for free.
So this afternoon I texted I our member Stephen and I asked if he had time to try it out with me. While we were texting I figured out that he wouldn’t need to install software that he just needed to open a web browser and go to a page to use it. Finding that his internet connection wasn’t powerful enough to run it (we thought) in this ridiculous weather he drove to Starbucks. It was closed due to the weather. So he moved on and found somewhere with an internet connection and we continued to try to connect using Zoom and this time it occurred to me that there are versions of this Zoom for Android and iPhone. So after several hours we finally connected and after discovering what was causing earlier trouble we connected with four different types of devices. We had a meeting with two cellphones and a desktop and a laptop. Since that was more than two connections the meeting would be limited to 40 minutes so we disconnect the cellphones so the meeting could last as long as we needed. We then played around with the desktop sharing, swapping control, annotating and everything else we could find it would do. Suffice it to say it works pretty well.
So while there was no official meeting tonight we did get to try out some software and we invite you to do the same. Zoom.us for desktop laptop Android or iPhone.
