Techcafeteria Blog

Filling the Communication Gaps

Peter Campbell — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:55:18 +0000

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. I was taken aback by an Australian ruling that Facebook was an acceptable medium for serving subpoenas, until I read that the defendants had been unreachable by phone or email for months beforehand. At first I thought they were just avoiding the subpoena—still a big possibility—but then I reconsidered. How many people have completely abandoned their primary email accounts, assuming that anything in them is spam, in favor of only reading their mail on Facebook or MySpace? Probably a considerable number. I know, just from my day-to-day business dealings, that I will reach some of my coworkers more effectively by phone than I will by email, and vice versa.

So we have postal mail, the telephone, the telegram, facsimile, short wave radio, walkie-talkie and intercom holding up the old guard. And we have email, cell phone, IM, chat, IRC, blogs, Twitter, forums and social networking services charging in as new(er) mediums. And I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. The internet has opened up a Pandora’s box of communication mediums. So why use one over another? If we break it down to a manageable number of mediums, say, Phone, IM, email and Twitter, there are some intriguing differences. These differences don’t imply that one is better than another, but, certainly, one is more practical, courteous or efficient than another in a given circumstance. I evaluate the mediums on a few defining attributes:

Private or Social? While allowing that you can send group emails and IMs, and hold phone conferences, these mediums are primarily suited for one to one or a few conversations, whereas Twitter, and many of the web-based mediums, are social, with a large and partially unknown audience included.

Ambient or Invasive? A phone call is invasive, as is, to some extent, an IM. The sender is sitting there waiting for a response, so the courteous thing to do is to immediately re-prioritize whatever you’re doing and respond to them. Email and tweets, on the other hand, are casual mediums. Ignoring either one for an hour is within the bounds of the sender’s expectations.

Convenient or In Need of Management? I can send and receive IMs and Tweets and forget about them; phone calls as well, although voicemail needs to be dealt with. Email, on the other hand, is a demanding application. i have to manage it, sort it, categorize it, and clean it up.

Disposable or Archived? Phone calls and IMs, unless I record them, disappear after the conversation is ended. Emails and tweets are saved and searchable, giving me an always available archive of my communications (unless I delete them).

I suggested in a post last week that Twitter bridges the gap between email and IM, just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if a social, ambient, archive-able and convenient medium like microblogging is compelling in my organization. I took a look at Socialcast, one of the many corporate Twitter clones popping up, and I was very impressed with their implementation, which breaks the messages into statuses, ideas, questions and links.

Selling my staff on a tool like this is proving to be a challenge. The argument for it is fairly nuanced, and urging anyone to try something new on faith isn’t easy. They’re asking why this is better than the Microsoft Messenger chat application, or a more full-featured Sharepoint site? Those are good questions. Micro-messaging software lacks some of the features that these other mediums sport, but it provides a very simple and powerful, approach to information sharing that is far more collegial and less invasive than chat, while it’s simpler and quicker to use than Sharepoint. And my bet is that, in the war of communications mediums, it will ultimately be the ones that are easiest to use and least disruptive that win. Or it should be.
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.

Uncommunicative

Peter Campbell — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:54:54 +0000

I’ve taken down my contact page for a while. If you need to reach me, leave a comment – I have a good spam filter on those that should lock out the pest who has been sending upwards of 50 messages a day through my contact form containing links that, from the descriptions, I would never click on, even if I was foolish enough to click on a link in a message that I had no context for in the first place, which I’m not. I’m on vacation; when I return I’ll use some of the methods I’ve used on other web sites to discourage this type of creep.

Greening your Gadgets

Peter Campbell — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:39 +0000

Since I’m obviously not busy enough at Idealware (where most of the recent activity on this blog is cross-posted from), I did an article for my company’s newsletter (e.brief), and it’s up on the blog. Greening your Gadgets contains all sorts of advice on how to buy and care for your electronic devices in environment and budget friendly ways.

Keys to the Kingdom

Peter Campbell — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:15:52 +0000

Being a career nonprofit IT type, I’ve repeatedly had the unpleasant experience of walking into a new job, only to find that critical information, such as software licenses and server passwords, are nowhere to be found. So before I can start to manage a new network, I have to hack it. This sort of thing happens in other industries as well, but it strikes me as something that plagues nonprofits. On one extreme, we might have staff who become bitter and malicious as they depart, destroying records and withholding passwords. But even if the situation isn’t that dramatic, keeping track of sensitive, critical data is a bit tedious, and concerns about security and confidentiality make it additionally complex. Protecting and keeping this information available to the staff that need it can save a lot of time, money and frustration. Here are some suggestions:

Follow procedures: in tight budget and staffing conditions, the approach to IT management is often reactive and chaotic. Many key NPO IT Managers came into the role as “accidental techies”, which implies that many nonprofits only support technology by accident. In an environment where the Office Manager, Donations Clerk or a volunteer ends up deploying the servers and installing applications, it’s a safe assumption that there aren’t well-crafted IT policies in place. In this environment, losing critical passwords—or even failing to ever write them down—can be a regular occurrence.

Involve all stakeholders:Don’t assume that your It staff – who are already struggling to juggle the big projects with user support—are keeping good records. Audit them, assist them and back them up. Finance can take a role in tracking license keys along with purchase records. And far too many nonprofit executives don’t even ask for the system passwords. There is no good reason – no matter how many a tech might come up with – why the CEO or head of security shouldn’t keep an updated, sealed envelope with key passwords in the safe in case of sudden turnover or emergency. I’ve worked with a lot of techies who would scream about this. “The CEO can’t have the password! They’ll delete files! They’ll mess it all up!” Well, the CEO shouldn’t use the password. But they should definitely have it.

Foster a culture that allows technology staff to succeed: in two of my personal cases, the staff before me had left en masse and bitterly. They took the main network password with them and wiped out a lot of the IT records. Clearly, this is immature and unprofessional behavior. I wouldn’t think to defend it. But the circumstances that lead some immature techs to be resentful and abusive can be fostered by certain work conditions. If you are a nonprofit executive, there are some things that you can do to create an environment that is less conducive to bitterness and abuse.

Have realistic expectations for IT. If you don’t know how easy or hard it is to, say, upgrade a server or roll out a CRM system, don’t make assumptions. Hire a consultant, get a sense of what’s required, and adjust your expectations accordingly.

Participate. Have all staff participate in technology planning and adoption. There are people who install systems and there are people who use them. The installation has to be a joint process. Techs can not be held accountable for determining user’s needs, and users can not be solely responsible for evaluating technology. Whenever IT buys the system without user input, or users pick a system without technical oversight, the relationship between IT and staff becomes strained. Joint responsibility and accountability for system choices is required for a healthy environment.

Be appreciative. Tech support can be a very thankless job, and the smaller the staff and budget, the less rewarding. When your computer stalls or malfunctions, it can be frustrating. Even if you, personally, don’t take that frustration out on the tech who comes to fix it, are the rest of your co-workers that patient?

Don’t hire extremes. When hiring technical staff, assess their people skills. Make sure that their focus is on how technology supports the org, not strictly on the technology. At the same time, assess the non-IT staff for their technical skills, and hire people who are competent and appreciative of technology. We are long, long past the day when all computer support and expertise could be delegated to the IT Department.

It boils down to organizational culture and priorities. The hectic, resource-strained environments that many of us work in aren’t conducive to good record-keeping habits. This problem is bolstered by the general case where upper management is, for various reasons, ranging from misplaced faith to technophobia, not thinking of IT as a keeper of critical organizational records. But the truth is that a failure to keep it all written down is inevitably going to cost you, in dollars and productivity. The best solutions are holistic – create a culture where accountability for organizational assets is clear to all and shared by all, and, in particular, understand enough about the technical demands put on your IT staff – accidental and otherwise – to allow them to prioritize the small stuff along with all of the big projects and constant fires they put out. Being a career nonprofit IT type, I’ve repeatedly had the unpleasant experience of walking into a new job, only to find that critical information, such as software licenses and server passwords, are nowhere to be found. So before I can start to manage a new network, I have to hack it. This sort of thing happens in other industries as well, but it strikes me as something that plagues nonprofits.

Why We Tweet

Peter Campbell — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 02:03:06 +0000

Skeptics take note – I agree with you that Twitter, the “microblogging” service that your friends are pressuring you to join, appears to be the ultimate synthesis of vanity and wasted time. All of that potential is there, and, worse, the service seems to advertise those traits as its raison d’etre. But I’m going to ask you to bear with me as I offer some arguments for the service.

Twitter is, at its core, a messaging service that is more immediate and casual than email, but less immediate and intimate than IM (Instant Messaging). Just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call, Twitter bridges these digital extremes. But, unlike email – and more like, say, Delicious or Flickr, web sites that take what were traditionally private things – bookmarks and photo albums – and make them social, Twitter makes this messaging social. You can protect your tweets so that they can only be seen by people that you approve, but the majority of tweeters don’t do that.

I came to Twitter via NTEN. In 2007, as we were revving up for the annual conference in DC, a bunch of us signed up for Twitter accounts and used them—to mixed success—for casual announcements, off-agenda organizing and “Hey, what session are you in?” friend pinging. By the 2008 NTEN shindig in New Orleans, Twitter was an incredible asset. Even before the conference I was alerted to nationwide problems with flights, as I followed my friend @kariapeterson (and others) stories about being trapped in airports hours after their flights were due to leave.

Joining Twitter with a good chunk of my social/professional community was definitely a boon. If you sign up without a group of friends established, it can be a fair amount of work to identify and connect with people that share enough of your interests and motives for using Twitter. Because using Twitter involves more than just finding interesting people. It’s also about finding people who will interact with you on Twitter in ways that fit your needs and goals.

Margaret Mason’s wonderful blog entry on Twitter tips breaks down Twitter users into two camps:

“With the usual exceptions, people on Twitter tend to fall into two main camps. There are responders, who use Twitter as a channel to interact heavily with other users, and broadcasters, who use it primarily as a micro-blogging platform.”

The nptech crowd that I hang out with is squarely in the Responder’s camp. This is a social tool for us, not additional brochureware, and we use it to engage each other. For me, this has primarily meant that I have a casual channel to share and query my professional community on. I ask and answer a lot of questions. I engage in casual conversation. It’s allowed me to learn more about people who I share my nonprofit and technical interests with, broadening into family, film and music conversations, but in a way that is far more natural, friendly and interactive than poring over their Facebook profiles.

But the real power comes from the crowd. For example, @johnmerritt, who works as IT Director for a SoCal YMCA, did a Twitter survey about email server message limits. He requested that survey response tweets include the tag “#inboxlimit”, and then he set up a web page subscribing to an RSS feed for that tag, so that we could share a growing list of responses. This survey helped me provide context to my staff about our email policies.

On Monday, @webb, co-Exec at an awesome San Francisco nonprofit, asked us all what non-financial giving we have planned for the coming months, with the request that we tag our answers with “#givelist”. If you want to be inspired, and learn a lot of ways that you can be philanthropically productive without increasing your budget for donations, then the responses are a worthwhile read. You can learn even more at this website.

The typical assumption about any social networking site is that it will allow you to market your mission and, possibly, increase donations. Twitter, of course, can do those things, as Facebook or MySpace can, under the right conditions. But it’s a far more natural tool for generating ideas and camaraderie than cash. If you’re writing it off as just another place to promote yourself or your cause, I’d say that it deserves a deeper look.

Managing by Maxim

Peter Campbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:37:51 +0000

I’m a big fan of maxims, adages, anything that sums up an important, and possibly complex point in a sentence that can convey, if not the whole point, at least a conversation starter. The main challenge for a technology manager is communication, particularly with those who are uninterested and/or threatened by technological terms. I live and breathe this stuff, but I understand that I’m in the ten percent, the ten percent of people who like and are completely comfortable with technology. The rest of the world ranges from averse to highly competent, but not gaga over it all, like I am. Remembering that, and approaching each project and decision with that in mind, has helped me accomplish significant things for people who aren’t necessarily bought in to all of my ideas on first listen.

My current favorite maxim is Users own functionality, techies own platforms. This encompasses a couple of key concepts. First, technology isn’t owned by IT or the people they serve; it’s owned by both those who install it and those who use it. Therefore, technology can’t be evaluated and planned for solely by one group or another. But I’ve seen lots of cases of both – IT rolling out a fundraising database or point of sale system with no input from the people who will base their revenue goals on the systems’ capabilities; and staff rolling out equally complex systems with little or no IT guidance. Both situations are likely to be a big waste of funds and effort. Second, the breakdown is clear – IT might be wowed by the cool, Ajaxy interface on that web app, but if it doesn’t have the reporting capabilities that the users need, they might be better served by something less flashy. That’s for the users to decide. But IT will have a better read on how sound a database structure is for querying and reporting, or what will integrate successfully with other key systems. So IT should have sway over the technologies used, to a large extent.

If you build it, they won’t come is another favorite. Unlike some cinematic baseball greats, techies can’t build huge systems in anticipation of user’s needs and expect them to be adopted, no matter how great the systems are. Clearly identified needs and ample amounts of input and involvement are required for home-grown system development. At my job, I am pushing agile development, which includes user testing and input from early on in development. This means that I’m teaching my staff how to let go a bit, and be more open to feedback, as I’m teaching the non-techie staff how to evaluate functionality in unfinished, and possibly somewhat ugly systems. It’s not as much training as it is imploring all parties to have some faith in each other.

In business communications, you haven’t said anything until you’ve said it three times in three different mediums. This one was taught to me by one of my greatest mentors, an ED at a commercial law firm that I worked at in the 90’s. It boils down to the terser rule of thumb: Assume that they haven’t read your email. The biggest mistake that we all make is thinking that we’ve made our intentions and priorities clear by sending a memo or an all staff email. The truly important initiatives that you’re pushing through should be reiterated and the message diversified, to reach people who may not respond to your favorite medium. And, as Paul has well-pointed out, at least one of those mediums should be verbal, and hopefully in the same room.

What are the maxims that you manage and survive by? Leave your best ones in the comments.

The Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine

Peter Campbell — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:44:15 +0000

I normally try to avoid being preachy, but this is too good a bandwagon to stay off of. If you make decisions about technology, at your organization, as a board member, or in your home, then you should decide to green your IT. This is socially beneficial action that you can take with all sorts of side benefits, such as cost savings and further efficiencies. And it’s not so much of a new project to take on as it is a set of guidelines and practices to apply to your current plan. Even if my day job wasn’t at an organization dedicated to defending our planet, I’d still be writing this post, I’m certain.

I’ve heard a few reports that server rooms can output 50% or more of a company’s entire energy; PC Magazine puts them at 30-40% on average. If you work for an organization of 50 people or more, then you should look at this metric: how many servers did you have in 2000; how many do you have now? If the volume hasn’t doubled, at least, then you’re the exception to a very bloated rule. We used to pile multiple applications and services onto each server, but the model for the last decade or so has been one server per database, application, or function. This has resulted in a boom of power usage and inefficiency. Another metric that’s been quoted to me by IDC, the IT research group, is that, on average, we use 10% of any given server’s processing power. So the server sits there humming 24/7, outputting carbons and ticking up our power bills.

So what is Green IT? A bunch of things, some very geeky, some common sense. As you plan for your technology upgrades, here are some things that you can consider:

1. Energy-Saving Systems. Dell, HP and the major vendors all sell systems with energy-saving architecture. Sometimes they cost a little more, but that cost should be offset by savings on the power bills. Look for free software and other programs that will help users manage and automate the power output of their stations.

2. Hosted Applications. When it makes sense, let someone else host your software. The scale of their operation will insure that the resources supporting your application are far more refined than a dedicated server in your building.

3. Green Hosting. Don’t settle for any host – if you have a hosting service for your web site, ask them if they employ solar power or other alternative technologies to keep their servers powered. Check out some of the green hosting services referenced here at Idealware.

4. Server Virtualization. And if, like me, you have a room packed with servers, virtualize. Virtualization is a geeky concept, but it’s one that you should understand. Computer operating system software, such as Windows and Linux, is designed to speak to a computer’s hardware and translate the high-level activities we perform to machine code that the computer’s processor can understand. When you install Windows or Linux, the installation process identifies the particular hardware on your system—the type of processor, brand of graphics card, number of USB ports—and configures the operating system to work with your particular devices.

Virtualization is technology that sits in the middle, providing a generic hardware interface for the operating system to speak with. Why? Because, once the operating system is speaking to something generic, it no longer cares what hardware it’s actually installed on. So you can install your Windows 2003 server on one system. Then, if a component fails, you can copy that server to another system, even if it’s radically different – say, a Mac – and it will still boot up and run. More to the point, you can boot up multiple virtual servers on one actual computer (assuming it has sufficient RAM and processing power).

A virtual server is, basically, a file. Pure and simple: one large file that the computer opens up and runs. While running, you can install programs, create documents, change your wallpaper and tweak your settings. When you shut down the server, it will retain all of your changes in the file. You can back that file up. You can copy it to another server and run it while you upgrade components on it’s home server, so that your users don’t lose access during the upgrade. And you can perform the upgrade at 1:00 in the afternoon, instead of 1:00 in the morning.

So, this isn’t just cool. This is revolutionary. Need a new server to test an application? Well, don’t buy a new machine. Throw a virtualized server on an existing machine.

Don’t want to mess with installing Windows server again? Keep a virtualized, bare bones server file (VM) around and use it as a template.

Don’t want to install it in the first place? Google “Windows Server VM”. There are pre-configured virtual machines for every operating system made available for download.

Want to dramatically reduce the number of computers in your server room, thereby maximizing the power usage of the remaining systems? Develop a virtualization strategy as part of our technology plan.

This is just the surface of the benefits of virtualization. There are some concerns and gotchas, too, that need to be considered, and I’ll be blogging more about it.

But the short story is that we have great tools and opportunities to make our systems more supportive of our environment, curbing the global warming crisis one server room at a time. Unlike a lot of these propositions, this one comes with cost reductions and efficiencies built-in. It’s an opportunity to, once in place, lighten your workload, strengthen your backup strategy, reduce your expenses on hardware and energy, and, well—save the world.

Stylin’

Peter Campbell — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:38:50 +0000

Those of you who read the blog at the site, as opposed to via feed, might have noticed a dramatic update in the blog’s appearance. To keep a dull story short, I haven’t been happy with my website at Techcafeteria for a while, so I rebuilt it last month, using a foundation called Frog CMS. Now I’m really happy with the site, simple though it be, and I wanted my blog to share the design. After a couple of days of serious CSS hacking, I dare you to tell me where I haven’t cloned it to the point that you can’t tell that you’re leaving Frog CMS and going to Wordpress. As of this writing, there’s still a bug in the positioning that i’ll resolve so that the sidebar stays put, to which I’ll only mutter the traditional curses against IE 6 and 7 and their broken HTML compliance. And I’ll revisit the Sidebar content soon as well – is the picture necessary?

Anyway, always good to have an excuse to keep those web skills up.

Complying with Data Security Regulation

Peter Campbell — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:48:09 +0000

An article appeared in the NonProfit Times this week regarding a recent ruling in Nevada requiring that all personal information be securely transmitted, e.g. encrypted. The article, States Push To Encrypt Personal Data is by Michelle Donahue, and quotes, among others, me and our friend Holly Ross, Executive Director of NTEN—it’s a worthwhile read. The law in question is a part of Nevada’s Miscellaneous Trade Regulations and Prohibited Acts. I’ve quoted the relative pieces of this legislation below, but I’ll sum it up here:

Personal information can not be transferred to you by your customers (donors) without encryption. Personal information is defined as any transmittal of someone’s name along with their credit card number, driver’s license, or other data that could be used to access their financal records.

Nevada is the first state to pass legislation like this, but it’s a good bet that they are the first of fifty. Massachusetts is right behind them. And if the government won’t get you, the credit card industry might. The regulations that they impose on larger retailers for credit card security are even tougher. These initially applied to retailers bringing in far more money via credit card than most of us do, but they have lowered the financial threshold each year, bringing smaller and smaller organizations under that regulatory umbrella.

So, the question is, how many of you receive donations via email? If you do accept donations over the web, are you certain that they’re encrypted from the time of input until they land inside your (secured) network? What do you do with them when you receive them? Do you email credit card numbers within the office? Retain them in a database, spreadsheet or document?

Most nonprofits are understaffed and unautomated. We accept donations in any manner that the donors choose to send them, and get them into our records-keeping systems in a myriad of fashions. The bad news here is that this will have to change. The good news is, if you do it right, you should be able to adopt new practices that streamline the maintenance of your donor data and reduce the workload. Even better, if the solution is to move from Excel or Word to Salesforce or Etapestry, then you’ll not only have a better records-keeping system, you’ll also have good analytical tools for working with your donors.

Automating systems, refining business processes, improving data management and maintenance—these are all of the things that we know are important to do someday. It looks like the urgency is rising. So don’t treat this threat as an impediment to your operations—treat it like an opportunity to justify some necessary improvements in your organization.

The relevent snippet from the Nevada law:

” 1. A business in this State shall not transfer any personal information of a customer through an electronic transmission other than a facsimile to a person outside of the secure system of the business unless the business uses encryption to ensure the security of electronic transmission.

2. As used in this section:

(a) “Encryption” has the meaning ascribed to it in NRS 205.4742.

(b) “Personal information” has the meaning ascribed to it in NRS 603A.040.

“Personal Information” is defined as:

“Personal information” means a natural person’s first name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements, when the name and data elements are not encrypted:

1. Social security number.

2. Driver’s license number or identification card number.

3. Account number, credit card number or debit card number, in combination with any required security code, access code or password that would permit access to the person’s financial account.

The term does not include the last four digits of a social security number or publicly available information that is lawfully made available to the general public.

Book Report

Peter Campbell — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 03:20:20 +0000

NTEN’s first book is available for pre-order, and you can find me in it. “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders” is a one of a kind book, designed to help the CEOs, COOs and EDs in our industry understand how technology supports their organizations. I wrote chapter 4, “How to Decide: IT Planning and Prioritizing”. You can also order it on Amazon; NTEN members can pick it up for $30 when they register for the annual conference. The book is due out in March.

About that Google Phone

Peter Campbell — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 02:59:48 +0000

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. Android is designed to run on everything from the simplest flip phone to a mini-computer, so how well it works will often depend on the hardware platform choices.

That said, HTC made many good choices and a few flat-out poor choices. Since it’s impossible to not compare this phone to the iPhone, then it’s obvious that they could have provided a bigger screen or included a standard audio jack (the G1 comes with a mini-USB headset; otherwise, you need an adapter). The iPhone, of course, is thinner, but that design choice was facilitated by the lack of a hardware keyboard. No G1 owner is going to complain that it’s modest increase in heft is due to the availability of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. That’s one of the clear advantages over Apple’s ubiquitious competition. Apple makes it’s virtual keyboard somewhat acceptable by offerng auto-suggest and auto-correct as you type, features that Android currently lacks, but should have by early 2009 (per the Android roadmap). But I find – as do many of my friends – that a physical keyboard is a less error-prone device than the virtual one, particularly without a stylus. I have some nits about the Android keyboard—the right side is slightly impeded by the stub of the phone, making it hard to type and “o” without also typing “p”, but it’s overall a very functional and responsive keyboard, and I do sometimes blog from my phone, so it was a critical consideration for me.

The hardware has some other limitations as well. It sports a 2MP camera; 3 or 4 would have been preferable. And they made an interesting choice on the memory, including 2GB on board, with expansion available on MicroSD cards up to 8GB. This has led to what seem like some of the major potential issues with the phone and OS, discussed below.

Overall, the design is deceptively unsexy. While the G1 isn’t as sporty as the iPhone, it is highly functional. It’s easy to hold; the curved “chin” actually supports talking on the phone in a way that my flat Treos and Wing never did; the Keyboard slides easily and quickly, making it’s use less awkward when you need it in a hurry, and the decision to include a Blackberry-style trackball, which some have criticized as extraneous, was actually sharp – I find it useful to navigate text fields when editing, and as an alternate to finger-scrolling. My favorite Solitaire game uses a trackball press to deal more cards. It’s actually handy and intuitive. Unlike other smartphones, I took immediately to the functionality of the buttons; they’re well-designed. Also nice – one handed operation on this phone for basic tasks like making calls, checking email and voicemail is really easy.

A Versatile Desktop

Unlike the iPhone and Windows Mobile, a big emphasis has been put on customization. You can put shortcuts to just about anything on the desktop, and you can create folders there to better organize them. I keep shortcuts to the dialer, calendar and my twitter client there, along with shortcuts to the people I call most, and folders for apps, games and settings. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts to applications. This, again, makes the phone a pleasure to use – the things I want access to are always a few taps away, at most.

It’s a Google Phone

The Android OS is young, but elegant. The primary thing to know, though, is that this is a Google phone. If you use GMail and Google Calendar as your primary email and calendaring applications, you’ll love the push email and no-nonsense synchronization. The pull down menu for notifications, with visual cues in the bar, is awesome; the GMail client is so good that I often use it to label mesasages because that function is simpler than it is in the web client. But if your primary groupware is Exchange/Outlook, then you might want to stop reading here. As of this writing, there are a few applications that – under the right circumstances – can sync your Exchange and GMail contacts. There’s no application that syncs with Outlook on your desktop. If you run on Windows, Google has a calendar sync. But your options for non-Google email are either POP or IMAP in the G1’s “other” email application, which is pretty lame, or some scheme that forwards all of your Exchange mail to GMail (my choice, discussed here). Google search is well-integrated, too, with a widget on the phone’s desktop, a dedicated search key on the keyboard, and a “when in doubt, search” default that pretty much starts a Google search whenever you start typing something in an app that doesn’t expect input. For example, in the browser, you just type to go to a web site, no need for a URL bar; from the desktop, typing will search contacts for a match to call, but if one isn’t found, it will switch to a Google search. And taht browser is excellent, much like teh iPhone’s, but lacking the multi-touch gestures. All the same, it;s a pseudo-tabbed browser that renders all but Flash-based web sites as well as the desktop, and puts Palm, Microsoft and RIM’s browser’s to shame.

Multimedia

Multimedia support also pales in comparison to the iPhone, which is no surprise. there’s a functional media player, and an app that, like iTunes, connects to the Amazon music store. there’s no support for flash, and the only installed media player is the Youtube app, but you can download other media players. You can store music and movies on an SD card (a 1GB card comes with the phone, but, if you plan to use it for music, you’ll want to purchase a 4, 6 or 8 GB card). All applications are downloaded to the internal drive, which means that there’s a limit on how many apps you can install – most of the 2GB is in use by the OS. I’m hoping that OS fixes and updates—which are delivered over the air – will address this, as it’s a potentially serious limitation.

Maps and Apps

Another compelling thing Maps and GPS functionality. While it doesn’t
do voice directions, the mapping features are powerful and extensible.
Street View features a compass, so you can see where you are going as
you walk, and there are already a number of apps doing great
integration with maps and multimedia, as you’d expect from a Google phone.

Since Android is so new, and the G1 is the only phone that we’ll see in 2008, it will be a while before the third party market for applications grows up to something competitive with Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Apple. While I have almost everything I need to do the things I do on a phone (and I’m a power user), those apps are pretty rudimentary in their functionality, and there isn’t a big variety to choose from. I have no worries that the market won’t grow – it’s already growing quickly. But another consideration is that Android is still for early adopters who are dying for the Google integration, or, like me, want an iPhone-class web browser, but require a keyboard.

Application Recommendations

I get all of my applications from the market, accessible via the phone. A lot of third-party markets are popping up, but they are either offering things that are on the Android Market or selling items (the Android Market only offers free software – this will change in January). I have yet tos ee something for sale that looked worth paying for, versus teh range of freely available apps.

Apps I’m using include Twitli, a Twitter client. TwiDroid seems to have better marketing, but Twitli seems faster and stabler, as of this writing, and presents tweets in a larger font, which my old eyes appreciate.

Anycut – this is a must have OS enhancer that broadens the number of things that you can make shortcuts to, including phone contacts, text messages, settings screens and more. Essential, as having contacts right on the screen is the fastest speed dial feature ever.

Compare Everywhere is an app that reads bar codes and then finds matching product prices online. How handy is that? But I think the ability to scan barcodes from the phone, with no add-on attachments, is pretty powerful, and something that the nonprofit industry could make use of (campaign tracking, asset amnagement, inventory).

Connectbot is an SSH client – I once reset a web server in order to get an online donation form working on Christmas Eve from 3000 miles away. Essential for a geek like me.

OI or AK Notepad – simple notepad apps. Ridiculously, there isn’t one included with Andriod.

Password Safe – encrypted lockbox. Splashdata has one, too, but Password Safe is more flexible, as of this writing.

WPtoGo is a handy Wordpress Blog publishing app, for those brave enough to post from a phone without spellcheck (I’ll only post to my personal blog with this – I have higher standards for Idealware readers!)

And the Solitaire game up on the Market is very nice.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m loving this phone and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else on the market – even an iPhone, because I live and die by that keyboard. If it sounds good to you, I’m assuming that you use GMail; you actually write on your smartphone, or would if it had a good keyboard; and that you don’t mind being a bit on the bleeding edge. Otherwise, keep your eye on Android – this is the first of what will be many smartphones, and it’s all brand new. For the first iteration, it’s already, at worst, the second best smartphone on the market. It can only get better.

Small Footprints, Robotic and Otherwise

Peter Campbell — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:00:43 +0000

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.

Not all penguins are Tech-savvy

Peter Campbell — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:01:57 +0000

There was an interesting and disturbing article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Mind you, it’s an election year; there are lots of these. But this one hit a few of the hot spots in my consciousness – comic strips and technology. Berke Breathed, author of Bloom County, Opus and the short-lived Outland comic strips, was interviewed regarding the end of Opus. This Sunday will herald the last appearance of his long-lived penguin, a mainstay in each of the three strips. Breathed has a number of reasons for retiring, but among them was the following interesting assertion regarding his readership, or lack thereof:

“...I strolled into a college campus after three years of doing my strip, no one had ever read it. In fact they hadn’t read anything, unless it was something from 25 years ago that their parents had given them the books of. So I already saw that the window was closing, that it was just a matter of a few years.”

His target audience of 20-30 year olds, as far as he could tell, were completely disengaged from newspapers and, therefore, his work. But were those college students dutifully reading the paper ten years ago? Doubtful! Further, he threw some numbers and predictions out:

Breathed said his readership was 60 million to 70 million people in 1985, when Peanuts had a readership of 200 million to 300 million and Calvin and Hobbes, 200 million people. “That will never happen on the Web. Your readership drops to a couple thousand people – maybe, if you’re lucky, 10,000.”

As a big aficionado of newspaper strips, I find this very distressing, but I’m also a bit of a skeptic. I would suggest to Breathed that he is predicting the future based on a transitional phase. Newspapers, as it’s plain to point out, are having a difficult time transitioning to the web-based information world. I grabbed this article from sfgate.com, the online version of my daily paper. But I only visit that site to find specific articles or manage my vacation holds. My idea of an online newspaper is my.yahoo.com, igoogle.com or netvibes.com. Each of these sites lets me group together all sorts of information that is fairly akin to what I read in the newspaper, including comic strips. I’m a techie and an early adopter, but trends show RSS adoption growing steadily, and rss is really simple syndication, a concept that a cartoonist should latch right onto. I can grab any strip from GoComics.com as an RSS feed.

It is a different medium. It has the disadvantage that Breathed points out – a fraction of the people who are delivered his strips in the paper they purchase will willingly subscribe. But how many of those people read them anyway? I’ve gotten Cathy in my paper for as long as I can remember, but I promise you, I never read it. For now, as we transition, his actual readership is probably down. But comic strips are far from down from the count. On the web, we can subscribe to—and only to—the ones we want to read, and brilliant strips that struggle for readership will stay in circulation. This is a big improvement for the medium. It’s really too bad that Berkeley Breathed, one of our most talented practitioners, won’t stick around for it.

Hacking my Exchange Data onto my New G1

Peter Campbell — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:19:13 +0000

I’m the proud owner of a new T-Mobile G1 – UPS delivered it yesterday. The G1 is the first phone to use Google’s open source Android mobile operating system, and it rocks. This is the first true competitor to the iPhone, with a large touchscreen and a desktop-class web browser on a 3G network with WiFi, GPS and a flip out, full QWERTY keyboard. The G1 is particularly compelling if you use GMail, GTalk and Google Calendar – the integration, particularly with GMail, is phenomenal. The email is pushed to the phone, and the application for reading it is on a par with the standard web client – insanely easy to archive, label and delete messages. This is much better than the GMail for Mobile App that runs on other phones. The other compelling thing about Android, which I’ll blog more about at Idealware, is the open source OS and open programming environment. Android reeks with potential.

But, if what you’re looking for is a cool phone, it’s important to point out that this is brand new, and, as an early adopter, I’m paying some early adopter dues. If you aren’t the pioneering type, you’ll do much better with an iPhone. The Android environment is open, but the number of apps available is pretty slim, with some glaring holes. Missing on G1 Day 1 (which, officially, is today, October 22nd), there is no Notepad/Text Editor; limited video playing, no secured storage (for passwords and the like) and very limited connectivity with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook. There’s no desktop sync program for Android—you can mount the phone as USB storage and drag files to and from it, but the only synchronization available, so far, is the built-in sync with GMail apps (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and a couple of brand new apps that can sync contacts with Exchange, given the right conditions.

My situation is this: I work in a Microsoft environment. We run Exchange 2007. I have an active extra-curricular professional life that lives in GMail and Twitter, primarily. So the G1 handles the latter beautifully—there are already three Twitter apps available—but the web site works great as well. It handles GMail phenomenally. But what about my work email, calendar and contacts? Solutions should pop up eventually. Funambol is promising an ad-based service that will start with Contact Sync, then grow to include Calendar and Email. A Google ContactSync app is available at the Android Market (you can install it from your phone), but it requires Exchange 2007 with the Web Services Extension enabled. We’re not doing that at Earthjustice, and I made a vow not to ask my Sysadmin to reconfigure the server for me (she’s got enough to do!). Finally, Google does have a Calendar Sync app, but it only works on Windows; I’m on a Mac, and while I have VMWare Fusion and Windows installed, I only boot up Windows when I have to, not often enough to keep the calendar up to date. So here’s what I’ve done, which is immensely kludgy.

Email: I used an Administrator-only feature to forward a copy of my mailbox to GMail. If you aren’t, like me, an IT Director with admin rights to your Exchange server, you’ll have to buy the System Administrator a healthy Amazon gift certificate and grovel a bit, most likely. On the Gmail side, I created a filter that labels each message from work with “earthjustice” and set up my EJ email address as a valid one to reply with, along with the “reply to address sent to” default. Now all of my work mail arrives twice – once in Outlook, once in GMail. I am hesitant about replying in GMail, because the Sync is only one way, and those replies won’t land in my Outlook Sent folder. But I get all of my mail pushed, so I don’t miss anything, and I can always jump to Outlook Web Access if I want to reply “in country”.

Calendar: this was a real kludge. Again, if I used Windows daily, I’d use the Calendar Sync. But I use my Macbook at home and work and generally log onto Outlook over Citrix, which I can’t install the sync on without installing it for the whole company. I worked out a complicated solution by publishing my calendar in icalendar format to iCal Exchange, a free server for storing calendars, then subscribed to it at Google Calendar, only to learn that either iCal Exchange is not sending the proper refresh headers to GCal, or GCal is inept at refreshing them. I couldn’t get it to recognize an update in three days, so I ditched that plan. But then I noted that, when I received Outlook appointments at GMail, they came with “Add to GCal” options. Since my Calendar was synched (via Google Calendar Sync on my Fusion WinXP desktop), I realized that I can just accept each appointment twice to keep both calendars in sync. Again, kludgy, but suitable until something better comes along.

Contacts: As mentioned above, there’s a contact sync app available, but it requires Exchange 2007 with web services enabled. I’m going to hold off. I have about 200 work contacts, and about 350 more personal/Nonprofit contacts, so my GMail contacts list is much larger than the one at work. I’m going to maintain them separately for the time being. So, no definitive answer here, but keep your eye on Funambol, who promise to have this going quickly.

It’s only a matter of time before someone licenses and resells Microsoft Activesync for Android, and other sync options will pop up like crazy. But, if you’re like me, and couldn’t wait for this phone, I hope there’s enough here to get you going. Please be sure to leave additional and better ideas in the comments.

From Zero to Sixty: What type of Project Management tool is appropriate?

Peter Campbell — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:48:58 +0000

Here’s another recent Idealware entry (from 9/25/2008). Note that the Idealware post has a healthy comment stream.

It seems like every month or two, I happen across a forum thread about project management tools. What works? Can you do it with a wiki? Are they necessary at all? Often, there are a slew of recommendations (Basecamp, Central Desktop, MS Project) accompanied by some heartfelt recommendations to stay away from all of them. All of these recommendations are correct, and incorrect.

Project software naysayers make a very apt point: Tools won’t plan a project for you. If you think that buying and setting up the tool is all that you need to do to successfully complete a complex project, you’re probably doomed to fail. So what are the things that will truly facilitate a project-oriented approach, regardless of tools?

Healthy Communication. The team on the project has to be comfortably and consistently engaged in project status and decisions

Accountability. Team members need to know what their roles are, what deliverables they’re accountable for and when, and deliver them.

Clarity, Oversight and Buy-In. Executives, Boards, Backers all have to be completely behind the project and the implementation team.

With that in place, Project Management tools can facilitate and streamline things, and the proper tools will be the ones that best address the complexity of the project, the make-up of the team, and the culture of the team and organization.

Traditional Project Management applications, exemplified by MS Project, tie your project schedule and resources together, applying resource percentages to timeline tasks. So, if your CEO is involved in promoting the plan and acting as a high level sponsor, then she will
be assigned, perhaps, as five percent of the project’s total resources, and her five percent will be sub-allocated to the tasks that she is assigned to. They track dependencies, and allow you to shift a whole schedule based on the delay of one piece of the plan. If task 37 is
“order widget” and that order is delayed, then all actions that depend on deployment of the widget can be rescheduled with a drag and drop action. This is all very powerful, but there is a significant cost to defiing the plan, initially inputting it, and then maintaining the information. There’s a simple rule of thumb to apply: If your project requires this level of
tracking, then it requires a full-time Project Manager to track it. If your budget doesn’t support that, as is often the case, then you shouldn’t even try to use a tool this complex. It will only waste your time.

Without a dedicated Project Manager, the goal is to find tools that will enhance communication; keep team members aware of deadlines and milestones; report clearly on project status; and provide graphical and summary reporting to stakeholders. If your team is spread out geographically, or comprised of people both inside and outside of your organization, such as consultants and vendors, all the better if the tool is web-based. Centralized plan, calendar, and contacts are a given. Online forums can be useful if your culture supports it. Most people aren’t big on online discussions outside of email, so you shouldn’t put up a forum if it won’t be used by all members. The key is to provide a big schedule that drills down to task lists, and maintain a constant record of task status and potential impacts on the overall plan. Gantt Charts allow you to note key dependencies – actions that must be completed before other actions can begin—and provide a visual reporting tool that is clear and readable for your constituents, from the project sponsors to the public. Basecamp, Central Desktop, and a slue of web-based options provide these components.

If this is still overkill – the project isn’t that complex, or the team is too small and constricted to learn and manage the tools, then scale down even further. Make good use of the task list and calendar functions that your email system provides, and put up a wiki to facilitate project-related communication.

What makes this topic so popular is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all answer, and the quick answer (“Use Project”) can be deadly for all but the most complex projects. Understand your goals, understand your team, and choose tools that support them.

Smartphone Follies

Peter Campbell — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:06:43 +0000

Here’s my 9/18/2008 Idealware post, originally published at http://www.idealware.org/blog/2008/09/smartphone-follies.html

If you man the support desk, or are the accidental techie for an org of ten or more people, chances are that you get a lot of questions about smartphones. And these generally aren’t the “what should I get?” questions as often as they’re the “how do I get my email and schedule on my new [Blackberry/Iphone/Treo/Razr/MotoQ/Sidekick/Android Dream]?”. If the state of computing technology were akin to smartphones, you’d have Commodore, Leading Edge, IBM, and Apple computers, along with IBM Selectric typewriters to support, all running different operating systems and different applications. It’s somewhat insane.

So how can you politely impose some sanity on the smartphone madness? People love THEIR devices; the choice of an Iphone vs a Blackberry is as heated as any political debate. But there are some commons sense arguments that IT can make for a modicum of standardization, without totally denying your users some choice.

It all boils down to email. While smartphones feature a range of operating systems, email platforms tend to support cross-smartphone access. So what’s your email system?

Microsoft Exchange includes ActiveSync. If you run an Exchange server, ActiveSync-capable smartphones can connect directly and wirelessly to it, providing contact, calendar, email and (on some phones) task synchronization. Any Windows Mobile phone includes Activesync, as well as Palm Treos and the newest iPhones (version 2 and above). Exchange 2007 also includes handy features like remote device wipes and access to network shares.

Google Apps/GMail Google makes a GMail for Mobile application that works on most smartphones capable of running java applications, which includes all of the major variants (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone and Palm).

If you don’t use GMail or have an Exchange server (you either run Outlook or Outlook Express without your own server, or you use a different system), Blackberries offer the ubiquitous solution. RIM, the company that makes them, runs their own server that can act as a gateway for your email service and forward the mail to your phone. Before Microsoft figured out how to support mobiles, this was a sweet, revolutionary offering, but my take is that, compared to Exchange/Activesync, it’s now a bit of a kludge. If you use Blackberries with Exchange, you can increase functionality by buying their Exchange add-in server, but that’s a significant investment that you’re not likely to make without a large fleet of phones. In the meantime, though, here’s a tip: when you set up that Blackberry to access Exchange, pick Outlook WebAccess, not Outlook (assuming you also run Webaccess). The integration through Webaccess updates the server when you read messages on the phone; the vanilla Outlook integration doesn’t. Outlook should be chosen when you don’t offer WebAccess with Exchange.

At my job, we have Exchange and a smartphone policy that states that we support Activesync, as opposed to any particular device. We recommend that our users get Treos or iPhones, because we like them, but don’t complain if they get Wings or MotoQ’s or whatever, because Activesync works the same way on any Windows Mobile device. The staff appreciates the guidance and flexibility; we enjoy the reduced time figuring every new phone out.

Here, There and Idealware

Peter Campbell — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:25:14 +0000

It’s official – I’m not even trying to keep this blog up to date anymore, because I aaccepted a volunteer gig blogging regularly at Idealware. As I’ve mentioned before, Idealware strives to be the Consumer Reports of nonprofit software, and, in my opinion, that description doesn’t do the site justice – it’s long been one of my most referenced resources; the place that a nonprofit can go to get focused, concise answers to those tricky questions like “What software is out there?”, “Which one fits my needs?” and “What are the best practices for deploying it?”.

I have two things up on Idealware this week: My new article, “The Perfect Fit: A Guide to Evaluating and Purchasing Major Software Systems” and my first blog entry “Smartphone Follies“.

Needless to say, I’m honored and excited to be publishing regularly to Idealware, and urge you all to go there and subscribe to the articles and blog, which features some very sharp friends of mine, as well: Steve Backman, Heather Gardner-Madras, Paul Hagen, Eric Leland, Michelle Murrain, and, of course, Laura Quinn, the founder and genius behind Idealware. See you over there!

Ubiquitious Blogging

Peter Campbell — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:34:40 +0000

Mozilla.org just released one of the most exciting Firefox add-ons to come down the pike – Ubiquity. This is very alpha – the user interface will definitely mature, so what’s there now is best suited for geeks like me who have always liked command shells and already do things like use the Mac’s Spotlight as their calculator (if you type 2 + 2 in Spotlight, it will tell you it equals 4).

Ubiquity is best described as a macro language for the web, or a personal mashup engine. You assign a hotkey (such as Alt-space or Option-space) and a box comes up, which you can enter ubiquity commands in. I’m not going to tell you all about them – just watch the video:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

At this point, Ubiquity’s functionality pretty much requires a Google account – the email, calendar, maps and contacts integration is all with Google’s offerings. I expect that to change rapidly, as developing custom commands for Ubiquity is at a very basic programming level.

The case uses that are immediately apparent include adding maps and multimedia content to emails and blog entries (I use Scribefire – this assumption assumes that you compose your blog in your browser); having a lot of info available without having to tab away from the web page you’re on; and making some complex web tasks far more efficient. Mozilla is ambitious, though – they see Ubiquity as the ultimate personal web assistant, that will someday let you issue a command to book a trip; issue another to set up a multi-party meeting, and, who knows? Vacuum the house and feed the fish. Aza discusses that vision here.

Try Ubiquity out. Install it from here. Let me know what you think, and what case uses you envision for it.

Current Projects

Peter Campbell — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:06:34 +0000

In addition to my primary pursuits—managing technology at Earthjustice and being a good member of my family—I’m working on a few additional projects that I’m also excited about:

Virtualization Webinar

I’m preparing a webinar for NTEN on the power and benefits of Virtualization technology. Geeky stuff, yes, but the entire concept of server management has been turned on its ear by this development and it’s fascinating stuff for even smaller nonprofits.

Software Purchasing article

Idealware will likely publish an article I’m writing on how to successfully accomplish a major software purchase. How to identify the suitable apps, prepare the Request for Proposal/Quote, and get the right people at the evaluation sessions.

BDP Website

The Briggs Delaine Pearson Foundation is a nonprofit in Clarendon County, SC, where the first action in what eventually became Brown vs. the Board of Education began. My Grandmother-in-law was one of the original signers of that petition, along with other family and the attorney, Thurgood Marshall. My wife and I are going to revamp the current website to tell the story in an engaging fashion, invite participation from others, and, ideally, make the site more of a tool in garnering support for an organization trying to accomplish the unfullfilled promise of the Brown decision in the community where it all began.

What are you up to?

Web Site Update

Peter Campbell — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:16:40 +0000

Over the weekend, I downsized Techcafeteria.com, something I probably should have done close to a year ago, when I started my job at Earthjustice. What’s left is pretty thin, and is less of a web site than it is a supplement to other things online.

Some say that we’re moving away from blogging to the next trend, dubbed “Lifestreaming“. But I wouldn’t call this a lifestream. “Stream-supplementing” might be more to the point. I hang out in a number of places online, the key ones being, in some kind of meaningful order:

LinkedIn – this is where I keep my resume and stay connected with people I know through work and community.

Twitter – This is where I do most of my online communication lately. My Twitter community is mostly made up of people I know through NTEN and other NPTech circles. You may think I’ve been pretty quiet in the two or three months since I last blogged, but I’ve published about 700 tweets.

NTEN, or, more accurately, the NTEN Groups like NTEN-Discuss and the SF-501TechClub. These are online lists, sponsored by NTEN. I’m also reasonable active on Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s excellent Information Systems Forum, a Yahoo Group.

Idealware – Laura’s made me a staff writer, of sorts, and I should be contributing more articles this summer. I also comment on the blog regularly. Some of my Idealware articles are also picked up by Techsoup.

So, those are great places to find me. And this is where you come to contact me, or catch up on where I’ve been. I can’t call it “lifestreaming” – my life isn’t a show, and if it was, it wouldn’t be a very interesting one. But I do publish he pieces of it that I think might be valuable to others, and I’d rather publish them in places that others go, so it makes sense to have a web site that serves more as an signpost than a destination.