I’m following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web. Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.
There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:
An award-winning friend of mine at NTEN referred me to this article, by Jeremy Reimer, suggesting that Word, the ubiquitous Microsoft text manipulation application, has gone the way of the dinosaur. The “boil it down” quote:
“Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don’t work that way anymore.”
Let’s get a bit geeky. Many Idealware visitors come here for advice on purchasing and deploying data management systems, such as donor databases, constituent relation management systems and content management systems. And, more often than not, are replacing older systems with new ones, meaning that one of the trickiest tasks is data migration. If any of this work has ever fallen to you, then you might have found yourself doing tedious editing and corrections in Excel, pouring over data screens or rows in Access trying to formalize non-formalized data entry, and generally settling for some lost or incorrect data moving from old system to new.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a magic wand that can instantly reformat the data to the proper format? Well, I have one for you.
This article was originally published on the Idealware Blog in May of 2009. Photo by ferricide It’s been a big month for Online Community Management in my circles. I attended a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference on the subject; then, a few weeks later, ReadWriteWeb released a detailed report on the topic. I haven’t read the report, but people I respect who have are speaking highly of it.Do you run an online community? The definition is pretty sketchy, ranging from a blog with active commenters to, say, America Online. If we define an online community as a place where people share knowledge, support, and/or… Read More »Oldstyle Community Management
I’ve been pretty fascinated by the news reports about how the Obama staff reacted to the technology in place at the White House. If you haven’t been tracking this, you can read the full story, but the short story is this: the Mac/Blackberry/Facebook-savvy Obama staffers were shocked to find ancient systems and technology in use at the White House – Windows XP, MS Office 2003, traditional phone lines, and web filtering in place – in other words, the same stuff my org uses. I found myself both sympathetic and skeptical regarding their plight
If you’re in a job that involves supporting technology in any fashion, from web designer to CIO, then the odds are that you do help desk. Formally or not, people come to you with the questions, the “how do I attach a file to my email?”, the “what can I do? My screen is frozen”, the “I saved my document but I don’t know where”. Rank doesn’t spare you; openly admitting that you can do anything well with computers is equivalent to lifetime membership in the tech support club.
We’ve come a long way since the Pony Express. It’s hard to imagine living in a time when your options for communication were limited to face-to-face, sllooowww mail, and, perhaps, carrier pigeon. Today, we have the opposite problem: there are so many mediums to choose from that a key communication skill is to gleam the method that the person you want to reach prefers.
This post was originally published on the Idealware Blog in November of 2008. After my highfalutin post on mobile operating systems, I thought I’d step back and post a quick review of my T-Mobile G1, the first phone running Google’s Android Mobile OS. Mind you, I’m not posting this from my phone, but I could… 🙂 Hardware Specs for the G1 In order to discuss this phone, it’s important to separate the phone from the operating system. Android is open source, based on the Linux kernel with a JAVA software development approach. The G1 is an HTC mobile phone with Android installed on it. … Read More »About that Google Phone
This article was originally published on the Idealware Blog in October of 2008. This is the final post in a three part series on Microsoft. Be sure to read Part 1, on the history/state of the Windows operating system, and Part 2, on developing for the Microsoft platform. Two More Stories – A Vicious Exchange In late 2006, I moved an organization of about 500 people from Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange 2007. After evaluating the needs, I bought the standard edition, which supported message storageup to 16GB (Our Groupwise message base took up about 4GB). A few days after we completed the migration, which… Read More »Biting The Hand – Conclusion
This article was originally posted on the Idealware Blog in October of 2008. This is part two of a three part rumination on Microsoft. Today I’m discussing their programming environment, as opposed to the open source alternatives that most nonprofits would be likely to adopt instead. Part one, on Windows, is here:http://www.idealware.org/blog/2008/10/biting-hand-that-bites-me-as-it-feeds.html Imposing Standards In the early days of personal computing, there were a number of platforms – IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, Amiga, Commodore, Leading Edge… but the first two were the primary ones getting any attention from businesses. The PC was geeky, with it’s limited command line interface; the Macintosh was cool with it’s… Read More »Biting the Hand Part 2