Category Archives: IT Management

Microsoft Action Pack: Vista and Office 2007

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Sooooo….the Microsoft Action Pack Q1 shipment arrives with Office 2007 Enterprise and Vista Business Edition upgrade. I spend 90 minutes digging bits of the Office 2007 beta 2 Technical Refresh out of my workstation before it allows me to install Office 2007.

Conversley, the Vista install has to be done over an existing XP install. WTF? That means if you want a clean install, you first have to install XP, then install Vista on top. This has to be a mistake, I’m sure that Bill’s boys and girls will be fixing this momentarily, right?

So I skipped Vista for now, and went with the Office 2007 Enterprise. This not only includes the usual suspects but a few others, like Groove, Expressions Web (The replacement for the unlamented FrontPage), Visio 2007, and a bunch of SharePoint stuff.

By my count there are at now at least three different technologies for “shared workspaces” offered by Microsoft; Groove, Sharepoint, and within some versions of Vista. Actually, four, because you can share OneNote notebooks in real time as well.

Before investing too much in the Microsoft versions, check out the Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet. I had a two-hour shared telephone conference with budget spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheet this morning, which worked out fine. It is a little funky when downloaded back into Excel, but it worked. And of course, we still like Backpack, I mean Basecamp.

Access 2007 Runtime

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Well, I wish I was pointing to the Access 2007 runtime, but I’m not, however, this Microsoft page, discusses several points of interest:

  1. The runtime will be available “shortly after the release to the general public of Microsoft Office Access 2007
  2. The runtime and developer extensions will be free downloads.
  3. The Extensions will include a packaging wizard, similar to the one for 2003, which optionally includes the runtime files, and any other files, necessary to create an MSI
  4. The Developer Extensions will include hooks for Source Code Control
  5. The Extensions will not include the Property Scanner or Customer Startup Wizard that were previously available in earlier versions.
  6. Links to the download locations will be posted on Office Online and the Access Developer Portal on MSDN.

Chron This Week:

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This week the Chronicle of Philanthropy includes their 2007 Technology Guide, which is a special advertising section for technology consultants, and fundraising software companies. An article by Scott Westcott attempts to make the connection between social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace with online charity fundraising, and attracting volunteers.

VolunteerMatch has attracted more than 1000 people who link to its online profile since joining Myspace in July.
[A]s of this month, MySpace listed 15,587 non-profit organizations. The largest is People Helping People, a group of people who want to work together in promoting the common good, which has 17,000 “friends” on MySpace.

There are additional articles on virtual communities, video games, and using cellphone text messaging for fundraising.
Another article discusses the relationship between charities and the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress.

Charities and foundations, which have devoted much energy in recent years to defending their organizations from charges of wrongdoing, and to trying to persuade Congress not to impose onerous new regulations, are hoping for a friendlier climate now that Demoocrats are in charge on Capital Hill.  

Blog discoveries

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I think I was a little quick with the delete button the other day, when I deleted an entry pointing to “Confessions of a non-profit IT Director“.

Mea Culpa.

If I remember correctly, this was accompanied by a comment to the effect that this was a blog by a person who is actually doing something. Too many of us are pontificating…I like to read about people who are actually trying to get something working.

Today I Cried was the other blog I had mentioned.

BaseCamp: Web-Based Workflow

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I was working with a trade association that has been struggling for a couple of years to transform itself from a volunteer association to having paid staff. I attended a meeting on Wednesday, and we were told that there was three-week deadline to complete a business plan and pro forma budget to submit to our state economic development authority. After lengthy discussion we agreed amoung the ten people in the meeting that we needed to produce essentially two documents which would be combined for the proposal. We assigned champions for both documents, and then one of our members said:

Well, we’re really all software developers in this room; we should be eating our own dog food here and using some kind of web-based project manager or workflow manager, instead of attempting to send copies of eMails around with huge attachments.

Fair enough. I waited for the other shoe to drop. The suspense was tangible:
Would the Microsoft SharePoint guy offer to host a site? Would the open source guru offer to put up a LAMP site with one of the open source workflow applications? Should I offer my usual FTP site+web bulletin board/Google Groups thing that I’ve used for clients for yonks?

Tense moments passed. We mulled features, development effort and cost. Finally a third guy said, “I’ll put up a BaseCamp project. It should take about thirty minutes.” And indeed, a couple hours laster we had our ten-user web site with:

  • Dashboard (home page)
  • Task List
  • File upload and download (with version control)
  • Writeboard (online word-processor with version control)
  • Messageboard
  • Calendar
  • User login with security settings
  • User and site administratration

You can have all changes pushed to eMail…but that means that you end up reading everything twice. You can have all changes appear in the RSS feed. That is a great way to be alerted of changes without having to fish through them in eMail. The free Basecamp service offers everything except the File upload and download function…I sprang for the $12.00/month to allow this feature and that also allows the hosting of 15 projects per site. If this works out for our current project, we’ll probably find other uses pretty quickly.

This is what Web 2.0 is all about. Lightweight, Hosted, Quick, Easy. No IT Guru Required.