techcafeteria

NTEN’s new issue of Change is out and I got a chance to sound off to Idealware’s Chris Bernard about the dream of “one database to rule them all”—doing all of your organization’s Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) in a single system. My interview is on page 22, but the whole issue is a dream for NPO’s struggling with wrangling information.

Suggestion: use a big monitor to view this. Change is a great magazine, but the Bluetoad viewer is somewhat tough to use on small screens.

NTEN Change, Issue 4

Yesterday I joined my frequent collaborators John Kenyon and Susan Tenby at the Marin Nonprofit Conference, where we presented a 90 minute panel on nptech, from servers to tweets. John deftly dished out the web strategy while Susan flooded us with expert advice on how to avoid social media pitfalls. I opened up the session with my thesis: You have too many servers, even if you have just one”. I made the case that larger orgs can reduce with virtualization tech and smaller orgs should be moving to the cloud. The crowd in Marin was mostly from smaller orgs, so I focused the talk more on the cloud option, and that’s where I got all of the conversation going. My goal with the slides was to do a semi “ignite”, given that I only had 25 minutes and I value the Q&A over the talking head time.

My friends in the Nonprofit Technology Network know that I have been championing a resurgence in plain old tech talk at NTEN’s annual conference for a few years now. While “technology” is part of the organizations name, it’s seemed to translate to “social media” for the last few years, to the point in 2009/10 that it seemed like the social media focus of NTEN might overwhelm the nonprofit one—the NTEN conference was trending on Twitter and more and more social media mavens were referencing “NTC” along with “SXSW“. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of staff and consultants that deal with servers, routers, wireless, Windows and virtualization at nonprofit oprgs were finding little of interest in the NTC session list.

So, in 2010, a group of us put together the first “tech tracK“. A subtrack of the IT Staff track of sessions, it included topics like Wireless Computing, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Budgeting, and Change Management—the core things that IT staff are dealing with these days. The mini-track was conceived as a peer learning and community building subtrack. We eschewed Powerpoints and daises for a more informal discussion format, mining the attendees for both issues to discuss and expertise to share. It was a great success: five high-rated sessions with good attendance and a stated appreciation for the takeaways provided. In 2011, the Tech track was back (even though I didn’t attend that year) and was also a success.

So the 2012 NTC planning is well underway, and I’m declaring the ultimate victory. There will be no Tech Track this year. Instead, the IT Staff track definition has been narrowed to this:

IT Staff: This track is for staff and consultants who manage and support technology infrastructure. This is a resource-sharing track for all nonprofit techies, no matter how you arrived at your role, looking to share success stories, challenges, voice concerns, and glean wisdom from each other.

To my mind, this is how it always should have been—a fifth of the sessions dedicated to those of us who toil in the IT trenches, providing the tools, systems and platforms that enable mission-focused endeavors.

So now’s the time for you to speak up—if you’ve taken on the challenge of supporting your org’s use of technology, what do you need help with? What do you want to see on the 2012 NTC session list that you can bring to your CEO and say “send me to San Francisco, because this is information we need to know?” NTEN is seeking submissions for session topics. You can submit one without committing to present on it. The goal is to hear about what interests you, and they’ll match up the session submissions with speakers and/or facilitators later on. So, have at it! Click here to submit your sessions.

Here’s a rant aimed at Apple and Microsoft.

Mac OSX Lion came out today, and it sports a lot of new features cribbed from IOS, the iPhone/iPad operating system. Steve Jobs has pretty much decided that the days of the PC are waning, and we want a mobile OS everywhere we go. He said that a year ago, and Microsoft was listening. Reports are that Windows 8 will be one operating system (that looks a lot like the boxy new Windows Mobile 7) for all platforms. I imagine that I’ll be running to Linux soon…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of convergence. I like watching TV on my laptop and I appreciate the ability to do email on my phone. I anticipate that, within a year, I’ll be commuting with a tablet (I’m waiting for the Android technology to mature a bit). But what’s wrong with letting the tools go with their strengths?

This is almost the reverse error that Microsoft made with the first Windows mobile, an OS for phones that had a start button, Programs folder and dropdown task list. And zero usability. Microsoft thought the same thing they’re thinking today: one size fits all; our users want standardization, and are willing to sacrifice usability in order to get the same interface on every device. WRONG. Users want tools that are good at getting jobs done. Neutering the PC, or making the phone too obtuse to navigate, in order to standardize the interface is more like servicing your branding needs at your customers expense.

Of course, what concerns me more about these moves are the fundamental differences between the sophisticated computer OSes (Windows 7, Snow Leopard) and the mobile OSes. Mobile OSes are, somewhat justifiably, rigid. You can’t offer the same level of customization on a low-powered, small screen device that you can on a powerful PC or laptop. Apple, of course, has taken this a step further by tightly controlling the flow of content via iTunes. And taking the additional, controversial step of censoring the content available via iTunes and the app store. While most of us (I think) aren’t upset by a vendor-imposed restriction on pornography, Apple has also censored Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonists, adaptations of classic literature, and magazines about competing products. We now have an app store for MacOS and one for Windows under development, and Microsoft has looked, once again, like an Apple-wannabee with their recent product moves.

So are we moving into an era where our major computing tools providers have graduated to content managers and censors? It sure looks that way. There’s a lot of easy money to be made—as Apple’s string of record-breaking profit quarters will attest—in taking the computing out of computing, and turning convergence into simply entertainment-delivery, while user content creation tools and environments get the back seat at the drive-in. I’m not happy with the trend.

Geoff Livingston of NPTech Strategic consulting firm Zoetica held a little contest yesterday, and I won a copy of his book. The challenge? Explain, convincingly, why Google’s latest attempt at social networking, Google+, is not just a shiny object. Or why it is one. I chose the former, here’s my winning post:

Here’s my take on why, after the shininess fades, Google+ will still be an active social network.

First, they’ve learned from mistakes, theirs and others. They learned a lot from the failed Wave and Buzz projects, making privacy front and center; doing uncharacteristically flashy UI design (even stealing one of the Apple guys to do it); and not being too heavy-handed in the rollout. They are leveraging the Google App ecosystem, as Buzz tried to, but this seems like a cleaner and more serious effort—instead of just pasting a social network onto GMail, they’re incorporating apps like Picasa into it. Those of us already drinking the Google Koolaid (and they say that Google Apps is a high priority) will find it very useful (as opposed to redundant, as Buzz largely was).

The biggest lesson they learned was to not let people stream pollute as easily as they could on Buzz. I maintain that Buzz is a great platform for communications. It’s the ultimate cross between a blog and blog comments that could foster great conversations and raise the art of information sharing, if we didn’t have to wade through 20,000 redundant tweets to get to the good stuff. Google opened a floodgate of noise there, and too many users—including very good friends of mine—were happy to add to the din.

Second, they’ve created something compelling. It out-Facebook’s Facebook for interpersonal sharing and it can stretch to Twitter functionality. What’s powerful here is that, unlike Facebook, where targeting subsets of your friends requires advanced knowledge of the platform and a lot of patience, this interface makes it easy to either have an intimate chat or broadcast info widely. It’s easy to follow strangers that I’m not really interested in conversing with, at the same time that I can have deep talks with my close friends. They really got it right with Circles—friend/follower management on FB and Twitter is ridiculously kludgy in comparison. So, unlike Wave, which was too obtuse, and unlike Buzz, which wasn’t compelling, this is elegant and compelling. It wins people over.

Third, they’ve nailed SEO. The early adopters are raving about the hits it’s generating and the great statistics available. That’s going to be a more sticky draw than the shininess.

Most of all, they’ve emulated the cool Facebook stuff while shedding all of the annoyances. You can friend strangers here without over-sharing with them. You can +1 a commercial entity (or NPO) without inviting them to flood your stream with ads. You can tell your best friend something without sharing it with your mom. And that’s all easy; there’s no complicated help screen or multi-level privacy settings to contend with. It just works.

We’re all back from the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where nine of the ten Idealware bloggers congregated, along with some 1,440 of our peers in the nptech community. What a gas! NTC, as we call the conference, is what high school would have been like if everyone had been a member of the popular clique. The combination of peer education and celebration of our common interest in saving the world with heart and technology make for an exuberant occasion. And I can’t say enough about the awe and appreciation I have for Holly, Anna, Annaliese, Brett, Sarah and Karl, and the amazing event that they recreate year after year for us.

But, enough gushing. One of my (many) rants regards my concern that, although the biggest group of people that we call “nptechies” are the ones who support technology in their organizations, our biggest nptech conferences focus heavily on social media and the web (NTC, Netsquared, and now SXSW). It is true that the advent of social media and the interactive web is spawning a revolution in the way that we do advocacy and fundraising. But there is no less of a revolution in our server rooms, where virtualization, cloud computing and wireless devices are changing the entire way that we manage and deliver applications.

Our System Administrators, Support Specialists and Accidental Techies need to share in the peer support that can inform their efforts and help them feel more connected, both to their missions and the broader community. This year, in deference to a throat getting hoarse from ranting, I took a first stab at addressing this gap.

The Tech Track

The tech track was conceived as a six session “mini” track; five of the proposed sessions made the cut. The topics went from the basics to the broad overview:

• Tech Track 1: Working Without a Wire (But With a Net): Dealing with Wireless Networks, Laptops, and Cell Phones


• Tech Track 2: Proper Plumbing: Virtualization and Networking Technologies


• Tech Track 3: Earth to Cloud: When, Why and How to Outsource Applications


• Tech Track 4: Budget vs Benefits: Providing Top Class Technology in Constrained Resource Environments


• Tech Track 5: Articulating Tech: How to Win Friends and Influence Luddites.

Joining me in these sessions were fellow blogger Johanna Bates of OpenIssue, Matt Eshleman of CITIDC, Tracy Kronzak of Applied Research Center, John Merritt of the San Diego YMCA, Michelle Murrain of OpenIssue, Michael Sola of National Wildlife Federation and Thomas Taylor of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Subject Matter

Instead of doing the usual Powerpoint presentations and talking to the crowd, we pulled the chairs into circles for these sessions and put the session agenda up for grabs, asking each group what issues, related to the session topic, were foremost in their minds. The conversation was rich, and served as a healthy catalogue of the challenges facing nonprofit technology practitioners. Some highlights:

• Supporting remote laptop use in a western state with very little wireless bandwidth available


• Securing our networks while making network data accessible on mobile devices


• Supporting use of and crafting fair policies to address the boom in mobile devices


• Understanding the risks and benefits of virtualizing servers and desktops


• Knowing how and when to virtualize, and how Storage Area Networks fit in the big picture


• Weighing the risk of cloud computing, which also entails weighing the risks of our non-cloud networks


• Knowing what to ask a cloud provider to insure that data is safe, even in the case of the provider going out of business


• Assessing the cost of owned vs service-provided applications


• Assessing the readiness of Cloud Computing, and moving large, complex server rooms to the cloud


• Chickens and eggs: what to do when IT is asked to budget, but is not part of the planning process prior?


• What strategies can be applied to provide good technology with limited budgets?


• What tools and resources are available to help with the budgeting process?


• How can we engage our users when we roll out new technology?


• How do we get them to attend training?

Next week, I’ll follow this up with some of the answers we came up with for these questions.

I recently took on the project of migrating the Idealware articles and blog from their old homes on Idealware’s prior web site and Google’s Blogger service to our shiny, new, Drupalbased home. This was an interesting datamigration challenge. The Idealware articles were static HTML web pages that needed to be put in Drupal’s content database. And there is no utility that imports Blogger blogs to Drupal. Both projects required research and creativity.

The first step in any data migration project is to determine if automating the task will be more work than just doing it by hand. Idealware has about 220 articles published; cutting and pasting the text into Drupal, and then cleaning up the formatting, would be a grueling project for someone. On the other hand, automating the process was not a slam dunk. Database data is easier to write conversion processes for than free form text. HTML is somewhere in the middle, with HTML codes that identify sections, but lots of free form data as well.

Converting HTML Articles with Regular Expressions

My toolkit (of choice) for this project was Sed, the Unix Stream Editor, and a generic installation of Drupal. Sed does regular expression searching and replacing. So I wrote a script that:

1. Deleted lines with HTML tags that we didn’t need;


2. stored data between title and body tags;


3. and converted those items to SQL code that would insert the title and article text into my Drupal database.

This was the best I could do: other standardized information, such as author and publishing date, was not standardized in the text, so I left calling those out for a clean-up phase that the Idealware staff took on. The project was a success, in it that it took less than two days to complete the conversion. It was never going to be an easy one.

Without going too far, the sed command to delete, say, a “META” tag is:

/

That says to search for a literal “less than” bracket (the forward slash implies literal) and the text meta and delete any line that contains it. A tricky part of the cleanup was to make sure that my search phrases weren’t ones that might also match article text.

Once I’d stripped the file down to just the data between the “title” and “body” tags, I issued this command:

s/.*(.*)/insert into articles (title, body) values (‘1’, ‘2’);/

This searches for the text between HTML “title” tags, storing it in variable 1, then the text between “body” tags, storing it in variable 2, then substitutes the variable data into a simple SQL insert statement in the replacement string. Iterating a script with all of the clean-up commands, culminating in that last command, gave me a text file that could be imported into the Drupal database. The remaining cleanup was done in Drupal’s WYSIWYG interface.

Blog Conversion

As I said, there is no such thing as a program or module that converts a Blogger Blog into Drupal format. And our circumstance was further complicated by the fact that the Idealware Blog was in Blogger’s legacy “FTP” format, so the conversion options available were further limited.

There is an excellent module for converting WordPress blogs to Drupal, and there were options for converting a legacy Blogger blog to WordPress. So, then the question was, how well will the blog survive a double conversion? The answer was: very well! I challenge any of you to identify the one post that didn’t come through with every word and picture intact.

I had a good start for this, Matthew Saunders at the Nonprofits and Web 2.0 Blog posted this excellent guide. If you have a current Blogger blog to migrate, every step here will work. My problem was that the Idealware blog was in the old “FTP” format. Google has announced that blogs in their original publishing format must be converted by May 1st. While this fact had little or no relationship to the web site move to Drupal, it’s convenient that we made the move well in advance of that.

To prep, I installed current, vanilla copies of WordPress and Drupal at techcafeteria.com. I tracked down Google’s free blog converters. While there is no WP to Drupal converter, most other formats are covered, and I just used their web-based Blogger to WordPress tool to convert the exported Idealware blog to WP format. The conversion process prompted me to create accounts for each author.

To get from WordPress to Drupal, I installed above-mentioned WordPress-import module. As with the first import, this one also prompted me to create the authors’ Drupal accounts. It also had an option to store all images locally (which required rights to create a public-writeable folder on the Drupal server). Again, this worked very well.

With my test completed, I set about doing it all over again on the new Idealware blog. Here I had a little less flexibility. I had administrative rights in Drupal, but I didn’t have access to the server. Two challenges: The server’s file upload limit (set in both Drupal and PHP’s initialization file) was set to a smaller size than my WordPress import file. I got around this by importing it in by individual blogger, making sure to include all current and former Idealware bloggers. The second issue was in creating a folder for the images, which I asked our host and designer at Digital Loom.com to do for me.

Cleanup!

The final challenge was even stickier—the posts came across, but the URLs were in a different format than the old Blogger URLs This was a problem for the articles as well. How many sites do you think link to Idealware content out there? For this, I begged for enough server access to write and run a PHP script that renamed the current URLs to their former names—a half-successful effort, as Drupal had dramatically renamed a bunch of them. The remainder we manually altered.

All told, about two hours research time, three or four hours conversion (over a number of days) and more for the clean-up, as I wasted a lot of time trying to come up with a pure SQL command to do the URL renaming, only to eventually determine that it couldn’t be done without some scripting. A fun project, though, but I’d call it a success.

I hope this helps you out if you ever find yourself faced with a similar challenge.

[Oops! Forgot to publish this Idealware post from late January…]

Here are a few updates topics I’ve posted on in the last few months:

Nonprofit Assessment

The announcement that GuideStar, Charity Navigator and others would be moving away from the 990 form as their primary source for assessing nonprofit performance raised a lot of interesting questions, such as “How will assessments of outcomes be standardized in a way that is not too subjective?” and “What will be required of nonprofits in order to make those assessments?” We’ll have a chance to get some preliminary answers to those questions on February 4th, when NTEN will sponsor a phone-in panel discussion with representatives of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, as well as members of the nonprofit community. The panel will be hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and will include:

• Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar


• Ken Berger of Charity Navigator


• Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D


• Christine Egger of Social Actions


• David Geilhufe of NetSuite


• and host Holly Ross of NTEN.

I’ll be participating as well. You can learn more and register for the free event with NTEN.

The Half-Life of Internet Explorer 6

It’s been quite a few weeks as far as headlines go, with a humanitarian crisis in haiti; a dramatic election in Massachusetts; A trial to determine if California gay marriage-banning proposition is, in fact, discriminatory; high profile shakeups in late night television and word of the Snuggie, version 2 all competing for our attention. An additional, fascinating story is unfolding with Google’s announcement that they might pull their business out of China in light of a massive cybercrime against critics of the Chinese regime that, from all appearances, was either performed or sanctioned by the Chinese government. There’s been a lot of speculation about Google’s motives for such a dramatic move, and I fall in the camp that says, whatever their motives, it’s refreshing to see a gigantic U.S. corporation factor ethics into a business decision, even if it’s unclear exactly what the complete motivations are.

As my colleague Steve Backman fully explains here, here’s been some fallout from this story for Microsoft. First, like Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft operates a search engine in China and submits to the Chinese governments censoring filters. They’ve kept mum on their feelings about the cyber-attack. Google’s analysis of that attack reveals that GMail accounts were hacked and other breaches occurred via security holes in Internet Explorer, versions six and up, that allow a hacker to upload programs and take control of a user’s PC. As this information came to light, France and Germany both issued advisories to their citizens that switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer would be prudent. In response, Microsoft has issued a statement recommending that everyone upgrade from Internet Explorer version 6 to version 8, the current release. What Microsoft doesn’t mention is that the security flaw exists in versions seven and eight as well as six, so upgrading won’t protect you from the threat, although they just released a patch that hopefully will.

So, while their reasoning is suspect, it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally joined the campaign to remove this old, insecure and incompatible with web standards browser.

Google Wave: Still Waters

I have kept Google Wave open in a tab in my browser since the day my account was opened, subscribed to about 15 waves, some of them quite well populated. I haven’t seen an update to any of these waves since January 12th, and it was really only one wave that’s gotten any updates at all in the past month. I can’t give away the invites I have to offer. The conclusion I’m drawing is that, if Google doesn’t do something to make the Wave experience more compelling, it’s going to go the way of a Simply Red B-Side and fade from memory. As I’ve said, there is real potential here for something that puts telecommunication, document creation and data mining on a converged platform, and that would be new. But, in it’s current state, it’s a difficult to use substitute for a sophisticated Wiki. And, while Google was hyping this, Confluence released a new version of their excellent (free for nonprofits) enterprise Wiki that can incorporate (like Wave) Google gadgets. That makes me want to pack up my surfboard.

Details have come in for two exciting events in February:

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.

...or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite “not very well-hidden” secrets. Share yours in the comments.

Google Search Filtering

Have you ever clicked the “Show Options” link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it’s located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on “Latest” under “Any Time”; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you’ve seen, or haven’t seen yet – how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn’t save? The funny thing is that Google has an “Advanced Search” screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can’t (such as searching for public domain media).

Microsoft Outlook Shortcuts

If you use Outlook, you know how simple it is to find your mail and calendar. Other common folders are conveniently placed in your default view. But if you’re the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange’s Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. That’s what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007’s screen) and choosing “Navigation Pane Options”. Highlight “Shortcuts” and then click “Move up” enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the “Shortcuts” bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you’re monitoring a norther user’s inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named “Inbox”. One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there.

Facebook Friend Lists

Nothing makes Facebook more manageable than Friends Lists, and, with the new security changes, this is more true than ever. If you’re like me, your connections on Facebook span every facet of your life, from family to childhood friends to co-workers. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to send links and messages to all of your co-workers but not your friends, or vice-versa? Click on “Friends” from the Facebook menu, then all connections. If you’ve become a fan of a page or two, you’ll see that Facebook has already created two lists for you: Friends and Pages. To make more, scroll through your connection list and click to “Add to List” option to the right. You can create new lists from there, and add friends to multiple lists.

When you share a link, note, video or whatever, you can choose which list to send it to by clicking on the lock icon next to the “Share” button and choosing “Customize”.

There Are More

Did you know about these features? Are there other ones that you use that make your use of popular applications and web sites much more manageable? Leave a comment and let us know.