Monday, 4/2, pre-conference: #ntcbeer! As detailed in my prior post, the 4th annual get-together will be within walking distance of the hotel this year and it will run a little later, so that everyone with a dinner to go to can consider themselves un-conflicted. Details are on the official Facebook event page, visible to all (even FB haters, whom I often sympathize with).

Tuesday, 4/3: as always, I’ll be participating in the Day of Service, helping out some TBD nonprofit with some technical advice. In the afternoon I’ll be manning the Idealware table at the Science Fair. This is a great place to catch me and schedule a meetup.

Either 4/3 or 4/4, I’ll be presenting my “Doctor Who in A Tale Of Two NTCs” ignite, featuring many infamous NTENners in Lego format and a an exciting Sci-Fi story about daleks, time travel and technology.

Wednesday, 4/4: I’m participating in three sessions on Wednesday. First up, at 10:30, Tips and Tools for Technology Planning, with Carlos Bergfeld and Ariel Gilbert-Knight of Techsoup and Karl Robillard of the St. Anthony Foundation. At 1:30 I’ll co present on Only You Can Prevent Security Breaches with Legal Tech Expert Kate Bladow. And at 3:30 I’ll join common co-conspirators Matt Eshleman of CITIDC and Judi Sohn of Convio to talk about VOIP.

Thursday 4/5: My one session today, again with Matt from CitiDC,will be an oldie but goodie – the Virtualization Salon. Whether you’re about to dive in to the world of virtualized servers, or you’re an old hand with advanced questions or wisdom to share, this will cover the gambit in #ntctech style, with Powerpoint only on hand as an instructional aid and round the room wisdom sharing.

Thursday is also awards day, and as the honored recipient of last year’s NTEN Award, I get to present it to this year’s winner (no spoilers here!).

Sleep will wait until post-NTC. The best nonprofit tech party is almost here—see you there?

• Face to AvatarSimilar Posts:
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For the three of you that noticed we were unavailable yesterday, my normally drama free (and wind-powered) hosting service, Canvas Dreams, had a nasty power failure and moved my domains to a new server. Since I follow what I consider to be a best practice of managing my DNS with a separate company from my hosting service (I’ve had to many unreliable hosting service experiences prior to finding Canvas Dreams), my site didn’t survive the transfer without a DNS update and, as usual, this all happened while I was out of town on a business trip. We’re back today.

In the Bay Area and still wrestling with the concepts of cloud computing? NTEN has you covered with a Cloud Computing mega event on Monday, August 29th. I’ll be presenting, along with such luminaries as Holly Ross, Allen Gunn, Donny Shimamoto and more.

And, finally, a bit of bragging about something I’m really excited about: we now have solar panels installed at our home (making this a very green blog indeed). We took a leasing deal from highly-rated Sungevity that should significantly reduce our energy costs along with our carbon footprint. Bill Gates might think home solar is a fad for the wealthy, but, hey, I work at a nonprofit and I not only can afford it, it will save me money. The picture above is our roof with the last panel being installed.Similar Posts:

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On Thursday, February 4th, at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern, don’t miss The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting. This panel discussion with represenatives from Charity Navigator and Guidestar will cover all of the questions I’ve been blogging about here. Join me with moderator Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar, Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D, Christine Egger of Social Actions, David Geilhufe of NetSuite, and host Holly Ross of NTEN. Free registration is here.

And on Wednesday, February 10th, from 10:00 to 2:00 Pacific (1:00 to 5:00 Eastern), NTEN and the Green IT Consortium are putting on the first Greening Your IT Virtual Conference. With a plenary by Joseph Khunaysir of Jolera Inc. and six tactical sessions explaining how your org can benefit yourselves and the earth, including the one I’m co-presenting with Matt Eshleman of CITIDC on Server Virtualization.  Registration is $120, and it looks well worth it.Similar Posts:

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Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is Climate Change. Here’s my pitch for an immediate step that could be taken to reduce the production of greenhouse gases significantly, while promoting good health; improving the economy in rural America; and reducing cruelty to animals. In fact, this suggestion is so logical that it’s a travesty that I have to suggest it. It makes Sarah Silverman’s recent hunger-ending proposal look paltry in comparison. Here’s my suggestion:

Close down Factory Farms.

Elininate Agri-Business.

The Humane Society reports that as much as 18% of all geenhouse gases are produced by agri-businesses. Agri-business practices increase air pollution, water pollution, and create general health risks.

The variety of public health concerns include Swine Flu, Diabetes and childhood cancer. As to our general health, the meat produced at these farms has doubled our intake of protein and contributed to the huge increase in obesity.

As if that isn’t enough, the healthier, sustainable family farms that once fed the nation have languished, destroying the economy in rural America. If the health of ourselves and our families, and that of our planet, weren’t enough, wouldn’t this be a case for dismantling this industry?

But, as the Humane Society points out, our lawmakers are giving Agri-business a free pass and stripping the EPA of their authority to regulate them. It’s the equivalent of the Tokyo police escorting Godzilla to the city. If we care about our future, we need to take drastic steps to contain the damage that we are doing to our planet. And we should start with the big, easy, bang for buck solutions. Like this one.Similar Posts:

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In addition to my fulfilling work at Earthjustice and the quality time at home with my lovely wife and Lego-obsessed 10 year old, here are some of the things that are keeping me busy that might interest you as well:

• Blogging weekly at Idealware, as usual. This is one of those rare entries that shows up here at Techcafeteria, but not there.  And I’m joined at Idealware by a great group of fellow bloggers, so, if you only read me here, you might get more out of reading me there.
• I recently joined the GreenIT Consortium, a group of nonprofit professionals committed to spreading environmental technology practices throughout our sector.  I blog about this topic at Earthjustice.  Planned (but no dates set) is a webinar on Server Virtualization; technology that can reduce electrical use dramatically while making networks more manageable.  This will be similar to the session I did at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in April, and I’ll be joined again by Matt Eshleman of CITIDC. I’m also helping Ann Yoders, a consultant at Informatics Studio, with an article on green technology for Idealware.
• On September 9th, I’ll be recording another episode of Blackbaud’s Baudcast with other friends, including Holly Ross of NTEN. The topic this time is technology management, a subject I don’t ever shut up about.
• Saving the big ones for last, NTEN’s first Online Conference is themed around the book, Managing Technology To Meet Your Mission. This one takes place September 16th and 17th, and I’ll be leading the discussion on my chapter: How to Decide: Planning and Prioritizing.
• In early 2010, Aspiration will bring my pitch to life when we hold a two day conference that is truly on nonprofit technology, geared towards those of us who manage and support it. I’ve been known to rant about the fact that the big nptech shindigs—NTEN’s NTC and Techsoup’s Netsquared—focus heavily on social media and web technologies, with few sessions geared toward the day to day work that most nptechs are immersed in.  The goal of the event is to not only share knowledge, but also to build the community.  With so many nptech staff bred in the “accidental” vein, we think that fostering mentoring and community for this crowd is a no-brainer.
• Further out, at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, I’ll be putting together a similar tech-focused sub-track.  Since the Aspiration event will be local (in the SF Bay), this will be a chance to take what we learn and make it global.

My nptech friends will forgive me for declaring my extra-curricular dance card otherwise closed—this is enough work to drop on top of my full-time commitments!Similar Posts:

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How Technology Might Shape the Future of Our Cities is basically a tribute to Mitchell Joachim, a particularly visionary scientist/architect/artist who has brilliant ideas about how we might make our urban centers eco-friendly.

Flying in Place: Videoconferencing is basic advice about what to look for in videoconferencing software, a potentially green investment.Similar Posts:

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Well, consider this. Say you start up a Web 2.0 business that allows people to bookmark, share, categorize and annotate links on your site. And, over the years, you amass thousands of users, some solid funding, advertising revenue—things are great. Then, one day, the server crashes. You’re a talented programmer and designer, but system administration just wasn’t your strong suit. So you write a painful blog entry, letting your users know the extent of the disaster, and that the lesson you’ve learned is that you should have put your servers in the cloud.

My recent posts have advocated cloud computing, be it using web-based services like Gmail, or looking for infrastructure outsourcers who will provide you with virtualized desktops. And I’ve gotten some healthily skeptical comments, as cloud computing is new, and not without it’s risks, as made plain by the true story of the Magnolia bookmarking application, which recently went down in the flames as described above. The lessons that I walk away with from Magnolia’s experience are:

• You can run your own servers or outsource them, but you need assurances that they are properly maintained, backed up and supported. Cloud computing can be far more secure and affordable than local servers. But “the cloud”, in this case, should be a company with established technical resources, not some three person operation in a small office. Don’t be shy about requesting staffing information, resumes, and details about any potential off-site vendor’s infrastructure.
• You need local backups, no matter where your actual infrastructure lives. If you use Salesforce or Google, export your data nightly to a local data store in a usable format. Salesforce lets you export to Excel; Google supports numerous formats. Gmail now supports an Offline mode that stores your mail on the computer you access it from. If you go with a vendor who provides virtual desktop access (as I recommend here), get regular snapshots of the virtual machines. If this isn’t an over the air transfer, make sure that your vendors will provide DVDs of your data or other suitable medium.
• Don’t sign any contract that doesn’t give you full control over how you can access and manipulate your data, again, regardless of where that data resides. A lot of vendors try and protect themselves by adding contract language prohibiting mass updates and user access, even on locally-installed applications. But their need to simplify support should not be at the expense of you not having complete control over how you use your information.
• Focus on the data. Don’t bend on these requirements: Your data is fully accessible; It’s robustly backed up; and, in the case of any disaster, it’s recoverable.

Technology is a set of tools used to manage your critical information. Where that technology is housed is more of a feature set and financial choice than anything else. The most convenient and affordable place for your data to reside might well be in the cloud, but make sure that it’s the type of cloud that your data won’t fall through.Similar Posts:

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I was with Dotable, a nice outfit out of Australia run by a guy named “Aussie Bob”, and it was a good place to be – decent pricing, really responsive support, mostly stable. I recommended Dotable often because the problems were minimal in relation to the great communication and supportive attitude of the staff.

A few months ago Bob announced that he was retiring and handing over management to another company. In short order, the new service deleted a (dormant) Drupal site off of one of my domains without telling me; and changed my mail records to point to a new spam filtering service, without informing me. Since one of my “client” domains routes his mail through EasyDNS (on my recommendation), this resulted in two days of mail being completely lost. During the crisis, every support ticket I put in got a “we’re forwarding this to our admin” answer. The admin had a backlog, I bet, because I wasn’t getting responses for days, and the responses I got were not helpful, and ducked the ones like “why did you change my MX record without telling me?”

Anyway, my friend/client is active on Green America’s forums (they used to be Coop America), and he’d heard very good things about Canvas Dreams, an Oregon hosting service with a wind-powered server farm and the exact plans and setup that I was looking for. So I made the move, and Techcafeteria,NPTech.info and Krazy.com, along with my other projects, are all a bit greener and happier today. And it does seem to me that this server is faster than the one I was on with Dotable. Those of you who actually visit the site (I assume that most of you simply subscribe) might have noticed some weirdness this morning as I adjusted a few things, but the blog came over without a noticeable hitch.

So, welcome to the same site, at it’s new green home.Similar Posts:

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There are reasons why Microsoft has dominated the market. Exchange is a mature and powerful product, that does absolutely everything that an email system has to do, and offers powerful calendaring, contact management and information sharing features on top of it. A quick comparison to Google’s GMail offering might look a bit like “Bambi vs. Godzilla“. And, as Michelle pointed out the other day, GMail might be a risky proposition, despite it being more affordable, because it puts your entire mail store “in the cloud”. But Gmail’s approach is so radically different from Microsoft’s that I think it deserves a more detailed pro/con comparison.

Before we start, it’s important to acknowledge that the major difference is the hosted/cloud versus local installation, and there’s a middle ground – services that host Exchange for you – Microsoft even has their own cloud service. If you are evaluating email platforms and including GMail and Exchange, hosted Exchange should be weighed as an additional option. But my goal here is to contrast the new versus the traditional, and traditional Exchange installations are in your server room, not someone else’s.

Server Platform

Installing Exchange is not a simple task. Smaller organizations can get away with cheaper hardware, but the instructions say that you’ll need a large server for mail storage; a secondary server for web and internet functions, and, most likely, a third server to house your third party anti-spam and anti-virus solutions. Plus, Exchange won’t work in a Linux or Novell network – there has to be an additional server running Microsoft’s Active Directory in place before you can even install it. It can be a very stable product if you get the installation right, but getting it right means doing a lot of prep and research, because the slim documents that come in the box don’t prepare you for the complexity. Once you have it running, you have to run regular maintenance and keep a close watch – along with mailbox limits – to insure that the message bases don’t fill up or corrupt.

GMail, on the other hand, is only available as a hosted solution. Setup is a matter of mapping your domain to Google’s services (can be tricky, but child’s play compared to Exchange) and adding your users.

Win – GMail. It saves you a lot of expense, when you factor in the required IT time and expertise with the hardware and software costs for multiple servers.

EMail Clients

Outlook has it’s weaknesses – slow and obtuse search, poor spam handling, and a tendency toward unexplained crashes and slowdowns on a regular basis. But, as a traditional mail client, it has a feast of features. There isn’t much that you can’t do with it. One of the most compelling reasons to stick with Outlook is it’s extensibility. Via add-ons and integrations, Outlook can serve as a portal to applications, databases, web sites and communications. In a business environment, you might be sacrificing some key functionality without it, much as you often have to use Internet explorer in order to access business-focused web sites.

But where Outlook is a very hefty application, with tons of features and settings buried in it’s cavernous array of menus and dialog boxes, Gmail is deceptively uncluttered. The truth is that the web-based GMail client can do a lot of sophisticated tricks, including a few that Outlook can’t—like allowing you to decide that you’d rather “Reply to All” mid-message—and some that you can only do with Outlook by enabling obscure features and clicking around a lot, like threading conversations and applying multiple “tags” to a single message. Gmail is the first mail client to burst out of the file cabinet metaphor. Once you get used to this, it’s liberating. Messages don’t get archived to drawers, they get tagged with one or more labels. You can add stars to the important ones. It’s not that you can’t emulate this workflow in Outlook, it’s that it’s fast and smooth in GMail, and supported by a very intelligent and blazingly fast search function. Of course, if that doesn’t float your boat, you can always use Outlook – or any other standard POP3 or IMAP client – to access GMail.

Win – GMail. It’s more innovative and flexible, and I didn’t even dig deep.

Availability

Exchange, of course, is not subject to the vagaries of internet availability when you’re at the office. Mind you, much of the mail that you’re waiting to receive is. And Outlook – if you run in “Cached mode” – has had offline access down for ages. GMail just started experimenting with that this week. If you’re not in the office, Exchange supports a variety of ways to get to the mail. Outlook Web Access (OWA) is a sophisticated web-based client that, with Exchange 2007 and IE as the browser, almost replicates the desktop Outlook experience. OMA is a mobile-friendly web interface. And ActiveSync, which is supported on many phones (including the iPhone) is the most powerful, stable and feature-rich synchronization platform available. Exchange can do POP and IMAP as well, and also supports a VPN-like mode called Outlook Anywhere (or HTTPS over RPC).

GMail only supports web, pop and IMAP. There’s a mobile GMAIL app which is available on more phones than Activesync is, but it isn’t as robust or full featured as Microsoft’s offering.

So, oddly, the Win for remote access goes to Microsoft over Google, because Microsoft’s offerings are plentiful and mature.

Business Continuity

So, not to belabor this, Exchange is well supported by many powerful backup products. In cached mode, it mirrors your server mailbox to your dektop, which is additional redundancy.

GMail is in the cloud, so backup isn’t quite as straightforward. Offline mode does some synchronization, like Exchange’s cached mode, but it’s not 100% or, at this point, configurable. Prudent GMail users will, even if they don’t read mail in it, set up a POP email program to regularly download their mail in order to have a local copy.

Win – Microsoft

Microsoft also Wins the security comparison – Google can, and has, cut off user’s email accounts. There seem to have been good reasons, such as chasing out hackers who had commandeered accounts. But keeping your email on your backed-up server behind your firewall will always be more secure than the cloud.

But I’d hedge that award with the consideration that Exchange’s complexity is a risk in itself. It’s all well and safe if it is running optimally and it’s being backed up. But most nonprofits are strapped when it comes to the staffing and cost to support this kind of solution. If you can’t provide the proper care and feeding that a system like Exchange requires, you might well be at more risk with an in-house solution. The competence of a vendor like Google managing your servers is a plus.

Finally, cost. GMail wins hands down. The supported Google Apps platform is free for nonprofits. Microsoft offers us deep discounts with their charity pricing, but Dell and HP don’t match on the hardware, and certified Microsoft Administrators come in the $60-120k annual range.

So, in terms of ease of management and cost, GMail easily wins. There are some big trade-offs between Microsoft’s kitchen sink approach to features and Google’s intelligent, progressive functionality, and, in well-resourced environments, Microsoft is the secure choice, but in tightly resourced ones – like nonprofits – GMail is a stable and supported option. The warnings about trusting Google—or any other Software as a Service vendor—are prudent, but there are a lot of factors to weigh. And it’s going to come down to a lot of give and take, with considerations particular to your environment, to determine what the effective choice is. In a lot of cases, the cloud will weigh heavier on the scale than the colossus.Similar Posts:

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