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:
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.
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.
...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.
Sometimes it feels like the bane of my existence is my office phone. It's so bad that I rarely answer it, preferring to forward it to Google Voice where I can peruse the barely readable transcripts just well enough to filter out the 90% cold sales calls I receive. So what a pleasure it was to answer my desk phone on Thursday and have an illuminating conversation with my Microsoft Licensing representative. He called to tell me that I own some awesome benefits that come with my Software Assurance program. I'm betting that I'm not the only one who was clueless about these benefits.
Microsoft Licensing, as you know, is the little-known tenth circle of hell. It's a conceptual labyrinth of terms and conditions that was likely conceived by a team of the writers of the original "Prisoner" series with the advice of contract attorneys that graduated from law school 30 years ago and have never since seen the light of day.
Software Assurance is the tax we pay on our MicroSoft purchases that allows us to upgrade to the newest versions without paying upgrade fees (as long as we've paid our software assurance fees, of course). I assume that this is of interest to Idealware readers because most of us pick up a lot of our MS software from Techsoup Stock, and the Techsoup Stock donations come with Software Assurance, not without.
But Microsoft isn't evil; they're just bureaucratic, and every now and then a few smart people step up out of the morass and do things that I appreciate. These Software Assurance benefits include:
The Microsoft Home Use Program provides staff with ridiculously steep discounts on MS Office. Register this benefit, and the allowed number of users (which I'm unclear as to how they calculate) at your company can purchase MS Office 2007 Ultimate Edition (or Office 2008 for Mac) for $9.95. That's not a trial edition, and it's the opposite of crippled -- Ultimate is the "everything but the kitchen sink" edition and it comes with a license key.
Microsoft ELearning is a series of online classes in standard MS products like Word and Excel, and Server products like MS SQL Server or Windows 2003. I did note that the list of available classes that my rep sent me looked a little behind the times; no 2008 or 2010 products covered, but many of us aren't on the bleeding edge anyway.
Microsoft Technet gives you access to forums and experts, as well as evaluation copies of new technologies. For example, as I write this, I just learned that I can pick up Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 betas via my MSDN or Technet subscriptions to try.
This isn't fluff. We've been paying full price for Office at home (more than we do at work) and I've purchased E-Training on MS products and an MSDN subscription (fairly equivalent to Technet) because I had no idea that I already owned them. It makes me feel much better about what seemed like a pre-emptive insurance program that makes me commit to the next version of MS products before I'm ready to make that commitment, at times.
Of course, this is smart business for Microsoft. With Google announcing that their Google Apps offering will be on a feature par with Office within a year, and OpenOffice under active development as a pretty comparable alternative, you don't want your business customers to get too comfortable with those free alternatives at home. It's just surprising to me that, for years, this was buried in the small print section of eOpen, and not broadcast widely. So I'm doing MS a favor and blowing the horn on this one.
To access these benefits, log onto eOpen (which I hope you're using to manage MS licenses!) and once you've signed in and clicked "unhide licenses", find your last Techsoup order (or a similar large purchase) and open it up. The very first link in the license detail should be "Start and Manage your Software Assurance Benefits". Clicking on that will pop you to a paragraph that includes a link to the "Software Assurance Benefits Management Tool". Click on that to get the benefits. The more MS software you've bought, the more tedious this will be: there are benefits associated with each Software Assurance purchase, so you'll need to register this way for every relevant order. But it sure beats paying for these things at Best Buy!
Internet culture addicts like me have taken gleeful note of Mashable's campaign to rid the world of Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6. Anyone who develops public web pages (and cares if they are compatible with other and/or modern browsers) is sympathetic to this cause. The hoops that we have to jump through to make our pages look acceptable in IE6 while taking advantage of the nearly decade old CSS positioning commands are ridiculous. When I was doing web consulting a few years back, IE6 compatibility coding generally took up about 20% of the total project time.
Microsoft's response to the Mashable campaign was to defend the brontosaurus-like pace of corporate IT Departments in performing application updates. Here's the pertinent MS Spokesperson quote:
“[Corporate IT departments] balance their personal enthusiasm for upgrading PCs with their accountability to many other priorities their organizations have. As much as they (or site developers, or Microsoft or anyone else) want them to move to IE8 now, they see the PC software image as one part of a larger IT picture with its own cadence.”
Huh! This from the company that kept threatening to drop Windows XP support in order to force us to Vista.
But, sarcasm aside, this is a flawed argument. The "cadence" in which an IT Department upgrades software should be influenced by changes in the general technology landscape. Business (and nonprofit!) networks use the Internet. Those networks are already integrated with the world at large. Since the web browser is one of the primary interfaces to external data, it's easy to make the case that it needs to be upgraded more often than word processors and spreadsheets.
Many major webs sites are designed with CSS 3.0 formatting. IE6 doesn't fully support the 11 year old CSS 2.0 specification. IT departments that aren't prioritizing this upgrade are providing poor support for users who need such websites. They're also creating more work for themselves supporting the workarounds. Large companies might have far more computers to upgrade, but they also have software that automates that process. The key issue is training. Microsoft dramatically changed the user interface of Internet Explorer with version 7, but there are options to default back to the IE6 layout. The hassle of learning the new interface is certainly not as bad as not being able to properly use websites that are designed for more modern browsers.
What really irks me is the way that Microsoft has described the "IE6 must die" campaign' as being intended to appease "technology enthusiasts". The push to move users to modern browsers is not about my desire to use non-business applications like Facebook, Digg and YouTube (and classifying these web sites as "non-business"is a pretty debatable point as well). It's about my desire to benefit from advancements in web technology, and provide my staff with new tools that promote their mission-focused work.
With the HTML 5 specifications about to become the new standard, IE6 is obsolete. The types of things that IE6 doesn't support are the things that are making web-based applications viable, affordable alternatives to traditional software. Microsoft has been in the driver's seat of the companies that set the pace of technology advancement. They should be consistent in supporting the migration and adoption to those new standards, given a reasonable amount of time. Eight years is reasonable. IE6 must die, and Microsoft should join the chorus.
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."
Reimer's primary reasoning is that Word was originally developed as a tool that prepares text for printing. Since we now do far more sharing online than by paper, formatting is less important. He also points out that Word files are unwieldy in size, due to the need to support so many advanced but not widely used features. He correctly points out that wikis save every edit, allowing for easy recovery and collaboration. Word's difficult to read and use Track Changes feature is the closest equivalent
Now, I might have a reputation here as a Microsoft basher, but, the truth is, Word holds a treasured spot on my Mac's Dock. Attempts to unseat it by Apple's Pages, Google Docs and Open Office have been short-lived and fruitless. But Reimer's absolutely right -- I use Word far more for compatibility's sake than the feature set. There are times - particularly when I'm working on an article with an editor - that the granular Track Changes readout fits the bill better than a wiki's revision history, because I'm interested in seeing every small grammatical correction. And there are other times when the templates and automation bring specific convenience to a task, such as when I'm doing a formal memo or printing letterhead at work. But, for the bulk of writing that I do now, which is intended for sharing on the web, Wikis put Word to shame.
The biggest problem with Word (and its ilk) is that documents can only be jointly edited when that's facilitated by desktop sharing tools, such as GoToMeeting or ReadyTalk, and now Skype. In most cases, collaboration with Word docs involves multiple copies of the same document being edited concurrently by different people on different computers. This creates logistical problems when it comes time to merge edits. It also results in multiple copies of the revised documents on multiple computers and in assorted email inboxes. And, don't forget that Track Changes use results in larger documents that are more easily corrupted.
A wiki document is just a web page on a server that anyone who is authorized to do so can modify. Multiple people can edit a wiki concurrently, or they can edit on their own schedules. The better wiki platforms handle editing conflicts gracefully. Every revision is saved, allowing for an easy review of all changes. Earlier versions are simple to revert back to. This doesn't have to be cloud computing -- the wiki can live on a network server, just as most Word documents do.
But it's more than just the collaborative edge. Wikis are casual and easy. Find the page, click "edit", go to work. Pagination isn't an issue. Everything that you can do is usually in a toolbar above the text, and that's everything that you'd want to do as well.
So when the goal is meeting notes, agendas, documentation, project planning or brainstorming, a wiki might be a far simpler way to meet the need than emailing a Word document around. Word can be dusted off for the printed reports and serious writing projects. In the information age, it appears that the wiki is mightier than the Word.
Next week I'll follow up with more talk about wikis and how they can meet organizational needs.
For the past four years or so, at two different organizations, I've been evaluating Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 as a Portal/Intranet/Business Process Management solution. It's a hard thing to ignore, for numerous reasons:
It's an instant, interactive content, document and data management interface out of the box, with strong interactive capabilities and hooks to integrate other databases. If you get the way it uses lists and views to organize and display data, it can be a very powerful tool for managing and collaborating on all sorts of content. As I said a year or two ago in an article on document management systems, it has virtually all of the functionality that the expensive, commercial products do, and they aren't full-fledged portals and Intranet sites as well.
Sharepoint 2007 (aka MOSS) is not free, but I can pick it up via Techsoup for a song.
It integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Office, to some extent, as well as my Windows Directory, so, as I oversee a Windows network, it fits into it without having to fuss with tricky LDAP and SMTP integrations.
All pretty compelling, and I'm not alone -- from the nonprofit CIO and IT Director lists I'm on, I see that lots of other mid to large-sized organizations are either considering Sharepoint, or already well-ensconced.
So, why does Sharepoint scare me?
What it does out of the box, it does reasonably well. Not a great or intuitive UI, but it’s pretty powerful. However, advanced programming and integration with legacy systems can get really complicated very fast. It is not a well-designed database, and integration is based on SOAP, not the far less complicated REST standard, meaning that having someone with a strong Microsoft and XML programming skill set on board is a pre-requisite for doing anything serious with it.
MOSS is actually two major, separately developed applications (Windows Sharepoint Services and Content Management Server) that were hastily merged into one app. As with a lot of immature Microsoft products, they seem to have been more motivated by marketing a powerful app than they were in making it actually functional. Sharepoint 2013 or 2016 will likely be a good product, kind of like Exchange 2007 or SQL Server 2003, but Sharepoint 2007 makes a lot of promises that it doesn't really keep.
Sharepoint's primary structure is a collection of "sites", each with it's own URL, home page, and extensions. Without careful planning, Sharepoint can easily become a junkyard, with function-specific sites littered all over the map. A number of bloggers are pushing a “Sharepoint invites Silos” meme these days. I stop short of blaming Sharepoint – it does what you plan for. But if you don’t plan, or you don't have the buy-in, attention and time commitment of key staff both in and out of IT, then silos are the easiest things for Sharepoint to do.
The database stores documents as database blobs, as opposed to linking to files on disk, threatening the performance of the database and putting the documents at risk of corruption. I don't want to take my org's critical work product and put it in a box that could easily break.
Licensing for use outside of my organization is complicated and expensive. MOSS access requires two or three separate licenses for each user - a Windows Server licence; a Sharepoint License, and, if you're using teh advanced Sharepoint features, an additional license for that fiunctionality. So, if I want to set up a site for our Board, or extend access to key partners or clients, It's going to cost for each one. There's an option to buy an unlimited access license, but, the last time I looked, this was prohibitively expensive even at charity pricing.
Compared to most Open Source portals, Sharepoint's hardware and bandwidth requirements are significantly high. Standard advice is that you will need additional, expensive bandwidth optimizing software in order to make it bearable on a WAN. For good performance on a modest installation, you'll need at least two powerful servers, one for SQL Server and one for Sharepoint; for larger installations, a server farm.
I can't help but contrast this with the far more manageable and affordable alternatives, even if those alternatives aren't the kitchen sink that Sharepoint is. Going with a non-Microsoft portal, I might lose all of that out of the box integration with my MS network, but I would jettison the complexity, demanding resources, and potential for confusion and site sprawl. I'm not saying that any portal/intranet/knowledge management system can succeed without cross-departmental planning, but I am saying that the risk of a project being ignored -- particularly if the financial investment was modest, and Sharepoint's not cheap, even if the software can be -- is easier to deal with than a project being fractured but critical.
if my goal is to promote collaboration and integrated work in my organization, using technology that transcends and discourages silos, I'm much better off with apps like Drupal, KnowledgeTree, Plone, or Salesforce, all of which do big pieces of what Sharepoint does, but require supplemental applications to match Sharepoint's smorgasbord of functionality, but are much less complicated and expensive to deploy.
After four years of agonizing on this, here's my conclusion: When the product matures, if I have organizational buy-in and interest; a large hardware budget; a high-performance Wide Area Network, and a budget for consulting, Sharepoint will be a great way to go. Under the conditions that I have today -- some organizational buy-in; modest budget for servers and no budget for consulting; a decent network, but other priorities for the bandwidth, such as VOIP and video -- I'd be much better served with the alternatives.
The last few weeks saw some big announcements in the smartphone world:
Palm released the phone that they've been promising us for years, the Palm Pre, with it's new WebOS, to reviews that were mostly favorable and summed up as "The iPhone's baby brother".
And Nokia's E71 hit our shores, an incredibly full-featured phone that you can get for just over $300 unlocked, and use the carrier of your choice. While this isn't a touchscreen, and is therefore suspect in terms of it's ease of use, it is an amazingly full-featured product.
Left in the wings were Blackberry, who keep producing phones, including their iPhone competitor, the Storm -- to yawns from the press, and Microsoft, who are talking a lot about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0, but seem to have really been decimated by the ugliness of their mobile OS when compared to just about anyone else's.
What's clear is that a few things differentiate smartphones these days, and the gap between the ones that get it and the ones that don't are huge. They are:
Responsive Touchscreen Interfaces. The UI's of the iPhone, Android and Palm's WebOS get around the sticky problem that phones were just to small to support anything but simple functionality without requiring an oppressive amount of taps and clicks. This is why Microsoft has fallen down the smartphone food chain so far and fast -- their mobile OS is just like their desktop OS, with no flagship phone that does the touchscreen nearly as well as the new competition.
Desktop-Class Web Browsers. This is where Apple and Google have drawn a huge line, and it looks like Palm might have joined them. All three use browser's based on Webkit, the same technology that fuels Safari and Chrome. On a 3G phone, this makes for a fast and complete experience that puts the Blackberry, Mobile Internet Explorer and the Treo's hideous Blazer. Add Google's voice activation (native on Android and available for iPhone), and their smartphone-optimized results (which don't work on the non-webkit browsers) and the task of finding a Starbucks or hotel on the road takes seconds, instead of the average ten to 15 minutes on the old, lousy browsers, which simply choke on the graphics.
Push Email. If you connect to Exchange servers, the iPhone and Pre have Activesync built in. If your mail is with Google, you're connected to it as soon as you tell an Android phone your login and password. And the Android phone app is the best out there, with Apple's mail running close behind it. What's ironic is that Microsoft targeted their biggest threat with Activesync -- the Blackberry's kludgy, but, at the time, unparalleled email forwarding -- and gave it wings by licensing it to Palm, Apple and others. This is fueling corporate acceptance of the iPhone and Pre, meaning that this Blackberry-beating strategy might have worked, but more likely it did it for Apple and Palm, not Microsoft.
Music. The iPhone is an iPod; everything else isn't, meaning that, if having a high quality phone and music experience on one device is a priority, you're not going to go wrong with the iPhone. I love my G1, but I weigh my value of the real keyboard and awesome, open source OS on T-Mobile over the iPhone's built-in iPod and Activesync on AT&T. As OSes go, Android is only marginally better than Apple, but the Apple hardware is much better than the G1. Newer Android phones are going to show that up.
People make a lot of noise about the apps available for the iPhone (and Windows/Blackberry) as opposed to the newer Android and Pre. I think that's a defining question for the Pre, but it looks like companies are jumping on board. For Android, it's quite arguably a wash. All of the important things are available for Android and, given that it's open source, most of them are free. And with those 18 phones due out by year end on every carrier, the discrepancies will be short-lived.
I have to wonder how long it will take Microsoft to "get" mobile. They have a heavy foot in the market as the commodity OS on the smartphones that can't get any buzz. But the choice to bring the worst things about the Windows Desktop experience to their mobile OS was unfortunate. Should I really get a pop-up that has to be manually dismissed every time I get an email or encounter a wireless network? Do I have to pull out the stylus and click on Start every time I want to do anything? What's even more worrisome is that Windows Mobile is a separate OS from Windows, that merely emulates it, as opposed to sharing a code base. Apple's OS is the same OSX that you get on a MacBook, just stripped down, and Google's OS is already starting to appear on Netbooks and other devices, and will likely fuel full desktops within a year or two -- it is, after all, Linux.
So, the state of the smartphone market is easily broken into the haves and have-nots, meaning that some phones have far more usable and exciting functionality, while most phones don't. There's a whole second post dealing with the choice of carriers and their rankings in the race to offer the most customer disservice, and it does play into your smartphone decision, as Verizon might be a very stable network, but their phone selection is miserable, and AT&T might have the best selection but, well, they're AT&T. I love Android, so, were I looking, I'd hold out until four or five of those new sets are out. But I don't know anyone with an iPhone who's unsatisfied (and I know lots of people with iPhones).
I tried Bing this morning and it’s not bad. Not bad at all. Bing.com is Microsoft’s new search site, soft-launched in “preview,” full launch June 4.
As I felt about its predecessor Live Search incarnations, I thought I would just say Bing stands for “BING is not Google,” as others have said. Not so fast. Bing surprises. It returns results very quickly, including on Firefox and Opera. It also has a fresh, enticing look and operation. For example, I really like the clickable bar to the right of each search result; roll over it, and a Flash-like popup gives more detail without navigating the full page.
And the results show a lot of smarts to them. I did a few comparison searches on Google and Bing, found them interesting and not entirely the same in a useful way.
I’m sold. Partly. I’m not ready to give up Google as my default search. I’m too used to the way it works, how to bend it toward the kinds of results that suit me. That said, I’m probably going to be likely going forward to supplement an important search with Bing at this point. Yup, keep using delicious and other social networking search sites, and for general search, I expect I will compare Bing and Google. (You can easily add Bing to the search option list in Firefox with a link at top of page.)
If you create an account, Bing will remember your results and also allow you to have a “cashback” account for using recommended Bing vendor partners. Hmm. I don’t know what I think about this from a privacy point of view or a business model point of view. As we all know, however, Google doesn’t provide search results as a community service either.
As far as advanced search syntax, some of it is like Google and for some of it, you need to read the help pages to understand it all. Some of the Bing-specific options seem pretty cool, and I look forward to getting used to them. I did miss being able to search by date, though maybe that’s coming when the site fully launches.
A year later, there is more life in search than in a while, including with Twitter emerging as a new meta-search mechanism, and new ideas about how search should work in the future. Today Google has 64% of the search market, Yahoo has 20% and Microsoft (with its older sites) has only 8%. And according to the WSJ , Microsoft’s own research shows 60% of users are happy with their current search tools. That said, given Google and Yahoo’s pervasiveness, and how important search is, 40% not happy is a lot of folks thinking they might do better with something new. 2/3 of online purchases begin on a search page. Given how much revenue this represents, both from the sales themselves and from advertising, the software titans have strong interest in innovating.
And Google quietly has added some new search features recently. When you get a result page, check out the “show options” link at the top to quickly refine your results. I like that too.
From a developer point of view, yes, I admit there is something appealing about having to worry about fewer development frameworks and APIs. If Bing grows, complexity grows again for web developers. That’s life for folks like us.
Yet, from a small business and nonprofit organization point of view, innovation at the top creates a climate of innovation up and down the software food chain. For example, there has a new wave of consolidation in commercial software for nonprofits lately. This wave appears bringing clearer support and stronger feature sets. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of innovation on the open source side, as Idealware.org’s recent twin reports on open source content management systems for web sites and on low cost donor databases have shown. Think about which of these trends helps more in making good choices or getting good prices and definitely give Bing a try this week.
Full disclosure: Steve often uses Microsoft software, and some of his best friends and family members do as well. He used Bing as well as Google to read news and other comments about bing.com, though "binging" (is that a new 2.0 word?) was not as easy as googling bing.
My big post contrasting full blown Microsoft Exchange Server with cloud-based Gmail drew a couple of comments from friends in Seattle. Jon Stahl of One/Northwest pointed out, helpfully, that MS sells it's Small Business Server product to companies with a maximum of 50 employees, and that greatly simplifies and reduces cost for Exchange. After that, Patrick Shaw of NPower Seattle took it a step further, pointing out that MS Small Business Server, with a support arrangement from a great company like NPower (the "great" is my addition - I'm a big fan), can cost as little as $4000 a year and provide Windows Server, Email, Backup and other functions, simplifying a small office's technology and outsourcing the support. This goes a long way towards making the chaos I described affordable and attainable for cash and resource strapped orgs.
What I assume Npower knows, though, and hope that other nonprofit technical support providers are aware of, is that this is the outdated approach. Nonprofits should be looking to simplify technology maintenance and reduce cost, and the cloud is a more effective platform for that. As ReadWriteWeb points out, most small businesses -- and this can safely be assumed to include nonprofits -- are completely unaware of the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization. If your support arrangement is for dedicated, outsourced management of technology that is housed at your offices, then you still have to purchase that hardware and pay someone to set it up. The benefits of virtualization and fast, ubiquitous Internet access offer a new model that is far more flexible and affordable.
One example of a company that gets this is MyGenii. They offer virtualized desktops to nonprofits and other small businesses. As I came close to explaining in my Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine post, virtualization is technology that allows you to, basically, run many computers on one computer. The environmental and financial benefits of doing what you used to do on multiple systems all on one system are obvious, but there are also huge gains in manageability. When a PC is a file that can be copied and modified, building new and customized PCs becomes a trivial function. Take that one step further - that this virtual PC is stored on someone else's property, and you, as a user, can load it up and run it from your home PC, laptop, or (possibly) your smartphone, and you now have flexible, accessible computing without the servers to support.
For the tech support service, they either run large servers with virtualization software (there are many powerful commercial and open source systems available), or they use an outsourced storage platform like Amazon's EC2 service. In addition to your servers, they also house your desktop operating systems. Running multiple servers and desktops on single servers is far more economical; it better utilizes the available server power, reducing electricity costs and helping the environment; and backups and maintenance are simplified. The cost savings of this approach should benefit both the provider and the client.
In your office, you still need networked PCs with internet access. But all you need on those computers is a basic operating system that can boot up and connect to the hosted, virtualized desktop. Once connected, that desktop will recognize your printers and USB devices. If you make changes, such as changing your desktop wallpaper or adding an Outlook plugin, those changes will be retained. The user experience is pretty standard. But here's a key benefit -- if you want to work from home, or a hotel, or a cafe, then you connect to the exact same desktop as the one at work. It's like carrying your computer everywhere you go, only without the carrying part required.
So, it's great that there are mission focused providers out there who will affordably support our servers. But they could be even more affordable, and more effective, as cloud providers, freeing us from having to own and manage any servers in the first place.
If your nonprofit has 40 or more people on staff, it's a likely bet that you use Microsoft Exchange as your email server. There are, of course, many nonprofits that will use the email services that come with your web hosting, and there are some using legacy products like Novell's Groupwise or Lotus Notes/Domino. But the market share for email and groupware has gone to Microsoft, and, at this point, the only compelling up and coming competition comes from Google.
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
Outlookhas 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.
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, because I am a big fan of all of the new technology that they are familiar with, but they walked into a network that is a lot like 90% of the businesses out there. The Bush Administration, perhaps surprisingly, was fairly current in their use of technology.
Some quick things I draw from this:
* The Obama campaign distinguished themselves by their smart use of modern, internet technology, and that use played a major role in their successful campaign.
* The shock they’re facing is less about the technology in place than it is about the culture they’re moving into. Political teams run freely and nimbly, and Howard Dean established the Web as the infrastructure of choice in 2004. Businesses, like the White House, do not drive so close to the cutting edge, for a variety of good reasons, such as the need for standardization and security.
* Over the next few months, the Obama-ans are going to compromise, and I’m dying to learn what choices they’ll make.
In my work, I'm on both sides of that fence every day, working with staff to understand why we have to standardize in order to manage our systems, stay a little behind the curve in order to avoid risk, and stick with applications like Microsoft Office because they have the mature feature set that we require. At the same time, I rally my staff to be creative in finding tools and solutions for our people, to stay abreast of which new tools are going to be worth the risk in terms of the benefits they offer, and understand that, should we get too far behind, it will be as risky as being too far out on the technological edge. We don't want to fall off of any cliffs, nor do we want to stand still as all of the other cars race around us.
Some of us, like the leader of the free world, can't imagine a day without a Blackberry; others, like a former free world leader, don't even want an email account. Most of us live in this world where we have to creatively embrace the new while we tighten our grips on the traditional, because technology platforms thrive on stability while they obsolesce rapidly. Where the Obama White House winds up might be a good indicator of where we should all be. I hope we’ll have a window into that.
As the proud owner of a T-Mobile G1, the first phone out running Google's Android Mobile Operating System (OS), I wanted to post a bit about the state of the Mobile OS market. I've been using a smartphone since about 1999, when I picked up a proprietary Sprint phone that could sync with my Outlook Contacts and Calendar. We've come a long way; we have a long way to go before the handheld devices in our pocket overcome the compromises and kludges that govern their functionality. My personal experience/expertise is with Palm Treos, Windows Mobile, and now Android; but I have enough exposure to Blackberries and the iPhone to speak reasonably about them. My focus is a bit broader than "which is the best phone?" I'm intrigued by which is the best handheld computing platform, and what does that mean to cash-strapped orgs who are wrestling with what and how they should be investing in them.
I wrote earlier on establishing Smartphone policies in your org. The short advice there was that the key Smartphone application is email, and you should restrict your users to phones that offer the easiest, most stable integration with your office email system. That's still true. But other considerations include, how compatible are these phones with other business applications, such as Salesforce or our donor database? How easy/difficult are they to use and support? How expensive are they? What proprietary, marketing concerns on the part of the vendors will impact our use of them?
The big players in the Smartphone OS field are, in somewhat random order:
Palm: PalmOS
Nokia: Symbian*
RIM: Blackberry OS
Microsoft: Windows Mobile
Apple: iPhone
Google: Android
Palm is the granddaddy of Mobile OSes, and it shows. The interface is functional and there are a lot of apps to support it, but there isn't much recent development for the platform. Palm has been working on a major, ground -up rewrite for about two years, code-named Nova, but it has yet to come to light, and there's a serious question now as to whether they've taken too long. Whatever they come up with would have to be pretty compelling to grab the attention of customers and developers in light of Apple and Google's offerings.
App Support: C (lots, but not much new; Treos do Activesync)
Ease of Use: C (functional, but not modern interface)
Cost: C (Not sure if there's much more than Palm Treo's available, $200-200 w/new contract)
Nokia's Symbian platform is notable for being powerful and open source. It's more popular outside of the US, I'm not sure if there are any Symbian smartphones offered directly from US carriers, which makes them pretty expensive. They do support Activesync, the Microsoft Exchange connector, and have a mature set of applications available.
App Support: B (Activesync, lots of apps, but missing some business apps, like Salesforce)
Ease of Use: B (Strong interface, great multimedia)
Cost: D (Over the roof in US, where contracts don't subsidize expense).
The Blackberry was the first OS to do push email, and it gained a lot of market and product loyalty as a result. But, to get there, they put up their own server that subscribes to your email system and then forwards the mail to your phone. This was great before Microsoft and Google gave us opportunities to set up direct connections to the servers. Now it's a kludge, offering more opportunities for things to break. They do, however, have a solid OS with strong business support - they are either on top or second to Microsoft (with Apple charging up behind them) in terms of number of business apps available for the platform. So they're not going anywhere, they're widely available, and a good choice if email isn't your primary smartphone application.
App Support: A- (lots of everything except Activesync)
Ease of Use: B (Solid OS that they keep improving)
Cost: B (Range of models at decent prices)
Windows Mobile has broad third party support and powerful administrative functions. It comes with Activesync, of course. There are tons of smartphones running it, more than any other OS. But the user interface, in this writer's opinion (which I know isn't all that pro-Microsoft, but I swear I'm objective), is miserable. With Windows Mobile (WinMo) 5, they made a move to emulate the Windows Desktop OS, with a Start Menu and Programs folder. This requires an excessive amount of work to navigate. If you use more than the eight apps (or less, depending on model/carrier), you have your work cut out for you to run that ninth app. And the notification system treats every event -- no matter how trivial -- as something you need to be interrupted for and acknowledge. It's hard to imagine how Microsoft is going to compete with this clunker, and you have to wonder how the millions they spend on UI research allowed them to go this route.
App Support: A (tons of apps out there)
Ease of Use: D (the most clunky mobile OS. Period.)
Cost: A (The variety of phones means you get a range of prices and hardware choices)
Apple's iPhone represents a leap in UI design that instantly placed it on top of the pack. Best smartphone ever, right out of the first box. Apple clearly read the research they commissioned, unlike Microsoft, and thought about how one would interact with a small, restricted device in ways that make it capable and expansive. The large, sensitive touch screen with multi-touch capabilities rocks. The web browser is almost as good as the one you use on your desktop (and this is important - web browsers on the four systems above are all very disappointing - only Apple and Google get this right). The iPhone really shines, of course, as a multimedia device. It's a full-fledged iPod and it plays videos as well as a handheld device could. As a business phone, it's adequate, not ideal. While it supports Activesync and has great email and voicemail clients, it lacks a physical keyboard and cut+paste -- features that all of their competitors provide (although the keyboard varies by phone model). So if you do a lot of writing on your phone (as I do), this is a weak point on the iPhone.
App Support: A (it's still pretty new, but development has been fast and furious)
Ease of Use: A- (Awesome, actually, except for text processing)
Cost: B (since they dropped it to $199).
Android is Google's volley into the market, and it stands in a class with Apple that is far above the rest of the pack. The user interface is remarkably functional and geared toward making all of the standard things simple to do, even with one hand. The desktop is highly customizable, allowing you to put as many of the things you use a touch away. This phone is in a class with the iPhone, but has made a few design choices that balance the two out. The iPhone makes better use of the touch screen, with multi-touch features that Google left out. But the iPhone is has far less customizable an interface. And, of course, the first Android phone has a full keyboard and (limited) cut and paste. It is, however, brand new, and I'll discuss the future below, but right now the third party app market is nascent. Today, this phone is best suited for early adopters.
App Support: C (it will be A in a year or so)
Ease of Use: A
Cost: A (G1's are selling for as low as $150w/new plan)
The big question, if you're investing in a platform, is where are these all going? Smartphone operating systems are more plentiful and competitive than the desktop variety, where Windows is still the big winner with Apple and the Unix/Linux variants pushing to get in. But the six systems listed above are all widely deployed. Palm and Nokia have the least penetration and press these days, but they're far from knocked out. Nokia could make a big push to get Symbian into the market and Palm's Nova could prove to be really compelling -- at one point, Palm was king of these devices. Today, the interesting battle is between the other four, Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google. Of these four, all but Android are commercial OSes; Android is fully open source. RIM and Apple are hardware/software manufacturers, building their own devices and not licensing their OSes to others. Windows Mobile and Android are available for any hardware manufacturer to deploy. This suggests two things about the future:
Proprietary hardware/software combos have a tenuous lead. RIM and Apple are at the top of the market right now. Clearly, being able to design your OS and hardware in tandem makes for smoother devices and more reliability. But this edge will wane as hardware standards develop (and they are developing). At that point, the variety of phones sporting Windows and Google might overwhelm the proprietary vendors. Apple is big now, but this strategy has always kept them in a niche in the PC market. They dominate in the MP3 player world, but they got that right and made a killing before anyone could catch up; that edge doesn't seem to be as strong in the mobile market.
Open Source development won't be tied to the manufacturer's profit margin. Android's status as open source is a wild card (Nokia is Open Source, too, so some of this applies). Apple and Microsoft have already alienated developers with some of their restrictive policies. If Android gets wide adoption, which seems likely (Sprint, Motorola, HTC and T-Mobile are all part of Google's Open Handset alliance, and both AT&T and Verizon are contemplating Android phones), the lack of restrictions on the platform and the Android market (Google's Android software store, integrated with the OS) could grab a significant percentage of the developer's market. I've been pleased to see how quickly apps have been appearing in the first few weeks of the G1's availability.
If I were Microsoft, I'd consider isolating the WinMo development team from the rest of the campus. Trying to leverage our familiarity with their desktop software has resulted in a really poor UI, but their email/groupware integration is excellent. They need to dramatically rethink what a smartphone is -- it does a lot of the same things that a computer does, but it isn't a laptop. Apple should be wondering whether their "develop your app and we'll decide whether you can distribute it when you're finished" approach can stand up to the Android threat. They need to review their restrictive policies. RIM has to fight for relevance - as customer loyalty, which they built up with their early email superiority fades, well, didn't you notice that Palm and RIM the only names in our list that don't have huge additional businesses to leverage? And we, the smartphone users, need to see whether supporting Android -- which has lived up to a lot of its promise, so far -- isn't a better horse for us to run on, because it's open and extendable without the oversight of any particular vendor.
* I have to own up that I'm least familiar with Symbian; a lot of my analysis is best guess in this case, based on what I do know.
While Peter is busy Biting Microsoft's hand, I figured I'd spend some time biting Apple's hand. I've been an Apple user since the Apple II, which I spent hours programming on back in college (oh yes, this dates me.) The first computer I owned was a Macintosh SE, and I have owned 14 Macs (or, briefly, Power Computing boxes) in the 21 years since.
I won't spend time here on my Linux desktop experiment(s), and I had a blessedly brief sojurn as a Windows user back in the late 90s. For the most part, I have spent the vast majority of my time in front of the Mac OS, from version 1.0 to 10.5. And, at the same time as it makes my computing life wonderful, it gives me profound misgivings.
No one (even Microsoft) will argue with the notion that Apple OS X has the best desktop user interface currently in use. They do say that "imitation is the best form of flattery" and if MS user interface is any indication, they love Macs.
Things "just work" in ways that make me spoiled. But part of the reason this is true is that Apple has a lock on both the hardware and the software. They don't have to spend developer hours making sure that every different chipset and processor and hard drive combination, etc. will work with their OS. So they spend their time on design and making things pretty and easy - because the hardware will work with the software - it's designed that way. Apple is, at it's heart, a hardware company. That's what they sell, and that's how they make a profit - not on software. Whether it be Macs, iPods, or iPhones, Apple sells primarly hardware.
To Apple's credit, they built OS X, their modern OS, on top of an open source base, called Darwin. It is UNIX, and provides an extraordinarily robust and secure underpinning for their user interface. That was a smart move. But, of course, their user interface is proprietary. Apple is still the leader in providing DRMed music to the world, and any application that runs on the iPhone has to be vetted by them, and has to fulfill certain criteria. They continue to make a profit using a standard proprietary software model. And as an open source advocate, that gives me pause.
However, Linux on the desktop (at least in the US) hasn't caught on, and isn't, in all honesty, anywhere near being able to compete with either Windows or Mac OS in terms of usability except for specific kinds of uses (at the low and high ends, like email/web stations and kiosks, or as workstations for developers - although tons of developers also use Macs.) And I can do more, and do it faster and easier on a Mac, so that's what I'm sticking with.
Would I like Apple to be different? Yup. Do I expect it? Nope. Because Apple will always (I think) be selling proprietary and premium products, I don't think they won't ever be in the position Microsoft is - as a monopoly. I don't necessarily think that they would behave much differently than MS in that position (although they'd likely do it with more style.)
"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).
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. 
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