The Last SBIR Conference

The supposedly last national SBIR conference (Small Business Innovation and Research) is happening in Milwaukee WI, November 6-9. The conference will be attended by U.S. federal agencies which engage in extramural research, that is, they pay people outside the agency to develop products and services which can later be bought by the public and the federal government. If you are a small business, you can get a piece of the action, SBIR grants, which in Phase I are typically around $100,000, and in Phase II $750,000. All the biggies are there, NASA, the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, Department Homeland Security. The US Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency are also included. Why is this of interest to non-profits? Non-profits often partner with for-profit companies. In our telehealth project, for instance, the majority of the money, (more than half) is going toward the non-profit side of the arrangement.

Conference Site

More on SBIR

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Microsoft Events - Exchange and MSDN

Exchange comes with the Microsoft Small Business Server offering, which is another way that people get into Exchange. Since SBS by design requires that everything run in the same physical server box, there can be performance problems if you are attempting to run anything other than Exchange on the same server. And maybe you will....how about a SQL-Server database back-end, or a SharePoint web server for internal documents and project management. Not to mention, your Active Directory, network security, virus-update and management software, SPAM update and managment software, other centralized workstation management. Oh, and by the way, you are using it probably for file and printer sharing (which is what servers used to be for in the first place). In short, I think the server is too valuable to "waste" on running eMail.

The afternoon events were the MSDN events. These included a discussion and demonstration of ATLAS which is Microsoft's version of AJAX. There will eventually be a set of extensions added to ASP.NET 2.0 to support all of the AJAX, I mean ATLAS functionality (remember FrontPage Extensions?)
What is promising, is that there will be creater cross-platform ability to run ATLAS applications, as the client side code is basically javascript. The framework is free for the download.

Microsoft Events - Vista and Exchange

The Microsofties descended on Burlington for the first time in over a year to perform their various stunts, and we gave them a warm and well-attended welcome. Microsoft always seems to be rolling our an update to something or preparing the technical community quote unquote for the newest paradigm shift according to Microsoft. In our case there were half-day sessions for TechNet (meaning mostly network managers), MSDN (meaning developers) and solution providers (meaning mostly vendors, with a smattering of large accounts, such as are available in the BTV area).

The morning TechNet sessions were given over largely to VISTA. Not much new here, except that Release Candidate 1 is indeed available and much more stable than the most recent beta. Current (US only?) testers of R2 can get RC1 from the Vista download web site for a nominal fee of about $10.00.

About a third of the morning session was given over to Microsoft Exchange, which is the email server program that Microsoft offers as the core to OutLook. My own experience with Exchange was almost ten years ago; when I set up a wide area email system using Exchange connectors that worked over dialup. It worked more or less, but then since individual ISPs offered POP mail accounts for peanuts, my advice has always been to use those for any organization under about 50-100 users. The effort of maintaining your own mail server, which has to address issues of backups, email retention, spam control, and virus protection, seems to outweigh any benefit that I can see in doing it yourself. Frankly the costs are too high for smaller shops, you have to be able to spread the cost over dozens of users to justify maintaining your own email system. And if you still want Exchange, you can get a hosted version from Microsoft and others like Intermedia for $5-$10.00 per month per user.

This Week in the Chron

From this week's Chronicle of Philanthropy

A report, "Exploring Foundation Financial Investments in Nonprofit Capacity Building" by the Human Interaction Research Institute determines that foundation support for so-called "capacity-building" grants, those that are used to improve agency operations are in decline. From the synopsis in the Chron:

In 2004, more than $5.9-billion in such grants were awaded, down from $6.5-billion awarded by foundations in 2002. The 2004 figure, while down from two years earlier, was still significantly greater than the nearly $3.7-billion given out in 1998.

This week in the Chron.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a technology section each week. Two items of interest this time:

Software Helps Charities Track Product Inventories

describes the Aidmatrix logistics software package which is used to manage the distribution of products and goods from warehouses to the field.

Charity E-Mail Messages Snagged by Spam Filters

"A study of nearly 10,000 e-mail messages sent by 28 non-profit organizations and political groups over a two-month period found that 24 percent of the messages did not make it to the e-mail boxes of the people who requested them."

The findings of the study , by Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, can be seen here.

Screen Capture with OneNote 2007

OneNote includes a screen capture tool that allows you to capture any part of the screen and paste it into a note (or anywhere else, for that matter�as it simply copies the screen shot to the clipboard). Once you have pasted a graphic image into OneNote, you can right-click on the image, and if the image has text in it, OneNote will extract the text, and place the text on the clipboard.

So, as a slightly esoteric example�today I'm working on trying to understand the structure of a particular database. I have a table open in Access' design view. This shows the structure of the data table. I want to copy this structure into OneNote. Here are the steps.

1. I click the 'clip' button in OneNote. This causes the screen to change to a grayed out version of the underlying application (in this case Access).

2. I draw from corner to corner, the section of the screen that I want to place in one note. When I click, OneNote copies the selected image to the clipboard, brings back OneNote, and pastes the image within my OneNote page.

Here is the image:

Here is how it looks in OneNote

It even contains a caption saying when the clipping was made.

Now to extract the text, I right-click on the image in OneNote and select 'Copy Text from Image'. Here is the menu:

And when I'm done, I can paste the just the text.

Field Name Data Type
occupation_skill_id Number
name Text

OneNote appears to be a program which strikes a balance between capability and complexity. It passes the 'five minute test', in other words, you can become productive with it almost immediately. But it has considerable depth and capability. Worth a look. The beta version of OneNote 2007 is available for free downloading at www.microsoft.com/downloads as part of the Office 2007 beta program.

Office 2007 Beta Technical Refresh

Office 2007 beta technical "refresh" will be available September 14th. Includes interface changes, especially to the upper left hand corner. And it is supposed to actually work with the Vista beta.

I'm happy with the current version so far, and am looking forward to the update.

How Lotus Outreach uses Basecamp to change lives - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Basecamp is an online project management system that is especially suitable for managing distributed projects over multiple time zones. Here are some examples how international non-profits are using Basecamp.   

Link to How Lotus Outreach uses Basecamp to change lives - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Upgrade & Relicense Hell - Symantec Anti-Virus Small Business Edition

I have (apparently) a gold maintenance agreement on my Symantec Anti-Virus Small Business Edition (5 users and a server). Recently they sent a notice that an upgrade was available from 10 to 10.1 (big woof). I'm now trying to install it, on my network, which consists of 1 server, 2 workstations and my laptop. You'd think this would be a 'setup and go' thing...but there are many more steps required.
1. Uninstall the Symantec Systems Manager
2. Reboot server
3. Install what appears to be the anti-virus server software. Already, this appears to be deviating from the instructions, as there is no mention of an 'upgrade', but rather it is just installing over the existing 10.0 version.
4. Reinstall the mangement server
5. Download another 14 megs of upgrades to the software
6. Reboot again.

3 reboots!

....later
So, Ok, I followed the procedure, and I think I'm upgraded. Why can't they automate this?

But wait, there is more.
The server reports that there is 34 days left until my virus license is due. So, I go online to renew it, and get a renewal for "Gold Maintenance". No mention of the virus definitions (which is what I'm really interested in, of course). I pay the $138.00 for five licenses. Somehow, I'm naively assuming that the program is going to be smart enough to figure out that I've upgraded my license and it will merrily continue downloading virus updates for another year. I mean, the program is smart enough to know that it is going to expire in 34 days, right?

So, this morning the message comes on. 33 days left until the license is due. I'm thinking....ahah, I did purchase another year of gold maintenance but I didn't purchase another year of the virus definitions. After searching through several pages of disorganized online help at the Symantec web site, I finally get to the upgrade site again, and go through the same process as yesterday. Once I choose the upgrade, and get to the page which is my order, I note that it says "Gold Maintenance" again. Time to call customer support.

I get right through. I ask the support damsel to check my order from yesterday, as I haven't seen or heard anything about it. She checks, and says, that I did place the order, and it is being processed. And then she explained the process, and as Dave Berry says, "I'm not making this up".

Once you place the order, you then wait 3-5 business days. Sometime during that period, you'll get an eMail which contains a PDF of a new serial number for your product. You then go online again with the serial number and download a new license file. Then you install the license file. Then you allocate the licenses to the workstations. I've invested more than two hours in trying to figure all this out already.

How many thousands of person-hours throughout the world are dedicated to chasing around all this nonsense? It is bad enough that we have to deal with viruses, but Symantec is just running amok. Too many versions, too many products, too many web pages.

Memo to Symantec. Updates should be a two step process.
1. Go online and type in the owners serial number.
2. Pay

Monthly Introducation: September

Welecome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. We feel that non-profit corporations and NGOs deserve the same advantages that technology can bring to for-profit business. To that end, we've dedicated ourselves to finding cost-effective ways to bring the benefits of wide-area networks, computer databases, IP videoconferencing and Voice over IP to our clients and friends. Check out our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide.