Meeting for a computer group at an Irish pub is a great idea… Unless you want to hear. The over all noise in the pub wouldn’t be bad for all speakers, but some of the presenters were not loud enough, and many of the attendees could not hear.

The topics are office in the cloud. Ms office, google docs iWork, and quip. Basic discussion in the benefits of cloud based solution, collaboration, offsite data, etc.

Given the price of ms office’s new office 365, between $70-$100 per year, many people may not want to deal with paying that subscription. Google Docs is free for most individual users, but costs $50 per year, per person for businesses.

A set of YouTube videos were also demonstrated that took people thru google docs. Again it was too hard to hear clearly, but it was a good idea to help people understand how google docs works. The link was shared with attendees and I will add it here.

One demo was a copy of open office that runs as a web app on any device. But you are actually running on someone else’s hardware. At 7pm the bar started trivia night, which made it even harder to hear.

rollapp is a new service that for $0.99 per month will provide you access to open office, and for $6.99 month they will make it add free.

While the topic was interesting between the noise level and the speakers inability to repeat questions and speak loudly and clearly, I was very disappointed.

Ms office $99 per year for 5 Computers and 5 mobile devices. With 20gb of storage per user on the 5 machines.

iWork, free on macs and iOS devices purchased after sept, 2013. While apple went to functional parity and removed a bunch of features, they have had three updates already adding more code and features back in.

Quip – this was a new one for me. This is Basically another office clone but focus on sharing and collaboration. Think of documents as lists of conversations. There is an iPad app.

Great news, the group is moving to TenPlus – an authorized apple repair shop, but the sound quality should be much better.