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**** NewsBytes ****
Virtual Promise 2006 full report
The 2006 instalment of nfpSynergy's annual (since 2000) survey tracking charities' use of, and attitudes to, the Internet. In the 295 organisations that responded this year the general trend appears to be that the last 3 years saw a saturation of web use for presence, brand and strategy and email use hitting a high, but there is still scope for tailoring an organisation's output specifically for members of its audience and employing databases to segment data. Full report here
The Big end of the Wedge
Big Issue founder, John Bird has launched an affinity card scheme in tandem with NCVO, but this time the emphasis is on benefits going to charities in local communities. Signing up for Wedge costs £20 and is valid for one year and can be purchased online, or via Wedge Traders in the area, who offer promotions and discounts. Between 25% and 50% of the card cost goes to the local charities with the idea that consumers benefit local businesses and projects alike. Wedge Card is the brainchild of John Bird, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue, and Diana Bird, his daughter.
www.wedgecard.co.uk
Think broadband
Andrew Ferguson's superb documentation on the development of broadband, encapsulated in a site formerly called adslguide.org.uk, has changed its name to a more memorable thinkbroadband.com, the UK's largest independent broadband news and information site. Apart from advice and details about broadband service providers the site reveals the intricacies of routers, equipment tests, reviews, and BT technology.
Voluntary Sector IT Survey 2007
The May 2007 edition of Charity Finance will include the results of the Voluntary Sector IT Survey 2007, only the results aren't in yet so there's still a chance to take part. The questionnaire should only take a few minutes and the data collected will be reported on an aggregated, non-attributable basis, so you need not have any concerns about confidentiality. Complete the Voluntary Sector IT survey 2007.
Are our PCs suitable for Vista?
Organisations with a lot of computer hardware may balk at the prospect of assessing whether they are suitable for Vista upgrades. Enter the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment solution Accelerator. This handy tool makes an inventory, assessment, and report of computers on a network to determine if they are ready to run the Windows Vista operating system. It scans computers running from Windows 2000 Professional or Windows 2000 Server upwards.
CITRA member meeting to discuss OS
The next member meeting of CITRA will be held on 18th April at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 12 Great George Street, London SW1 3AD (nearest tube Westminster) The discussion topic will be Open Source, with speakers for and against. Refreshments and registration start at 3pm; meeting aims to close at 5pm when there will be an opportunity to network over a glass of wine. The meeting is free for CITRA Professional Association members and £20 for non-members. To reserve your place visit www.citra.org.uk
Free download: Cloudmark server anti-spam
If you still haven't experienced the relief of spam-free emails, try it for yourself with a free download trial for your Exchange server. The beauty of the mail server-based system compared to client-based ones is that mails are detected at the server and then filtered into each user's spam folder using the collaborative feedback from other servers in the global Cloudmark network. The installation does not require a reboot, there are no rules to maintain and filtering can be enabled on a per user basis. Get your Cloudmark Server Edition Download Trial and be up and running in 10 minutes. After downloading you will be sent an email with your trial activation code. Learn more about how Cloudmark anti-spam works.
Experienced Sales/Account manager sought
We’re looking to recruit an additional sales/account manager for account management, client liaison,
following up quotes, co-ordinating installations, assisting in developing and implementing sales strategy, maintaining trade accounts, credit lines and relationships with appropriate suppliers.
If you know someone suitable who might be interested, do pass on our details (but no agencies please); where we recruit by a referral we make sure that the referee is appropriately thanked.
Contact us below for full details.
New broadband switching rules
Ofcom's new rules raises the possibility that Valentine's Day will in future become associated with love and harmony between broadband suppliers and their customers instead of massacre. The latest 14 February ruling dictates that net service providers must issue Migration Authorisation Codes (MAC) free of charge within 5 days of a request, in an attempt to eradicate the weeks of waiting experienced by many customers and falling levels of satisfaction with the switching process.
Roll your own display
The future is not bright, but grey, and flat. A new unrollable flat screen display based on Philips technology has been adopted by Italia Telecom and Polymer Vision, who pioneered the concept. The Readius® device unwraps 5" from about 2" wide, displays 16 shades of grey (colour still to come), includes 4GB of on-board memory, USB, GPRS/EDGE and DVB-H TV connectivity via wireless downloads and is intended also for emails, news feeds and PDFs.
Airline traffic increases
Planes are about to get noisier, meaning: the guy in the next seat is as likely to be chatting on his phone as he is to be emailing documents. Come Summer 2007, passengers will be able to make in-flight calls on their own mobiles and use broadband thanks to Inmarsat SwiftBroadband, a technology that employs a cabin-mounted picocell base station to transfer passenger texts, calls and emails on to satellites in space. The system will not be used below 10,000 feet, to avoid passengers' mobile phones seeking to register with ground-based cellular towers.
Vista guys admit Outlook security is too weak
... according to BBC business editor Robert Peston in his open letter to Bill Gates.
Older versions of Outlook have password storage algorithms whose protection is too weak for Vista and therefore passwords are not saved. Peston also uncovered problems with drivers for HP iPAQs and Olympus voice dictation machines.
*** More NewsBytes ***
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1. Web domains and hosting explained
Many confusions surround domains and web hosting but the basics are easy - and crucial - to understand. | ||
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Organisations are often perplexed when faced with questions like "Where is our web site?" and "Who controls our domain?" but the fundamentals can be grasped by non-techies too. Here we deal with 3 simple but crucial questions that helps everyone understand web-related issues better.
 How a web browser finds a web site What is my domain?A domain is like a sorting office location, filtering letters to postbags, packets to vans and big stuff on to lorries. Ours is coopsys.net and it deals with all the packets destined for that location. Like the sorting office analogy, coopsys.net filters mail packets to our mail server and web (www) packets to our web space. There are other filtering categories too but these are the most common. So, people sending and receiving emails don't have to worry about finding the physical machine where coopsys.net mail resides, and visitors to our web site don't have to go hunting for the IP number of a particular box that holds all our web content. The domain sorting office looks after it all. Pretty handy really because if the mail server is moved to a better machine, or we decide to upgrade to a bigger web space at a different hoster, all those IP numbers would change. Thus we just make the lookup changes known via DNS (Domain Name Services), and web surfers or email senders won't notice the switchover. Name Servers are just machines that lookup coopsys.net and redirect the request (for a web address, email, etc) to the right computer, and these DNS servers are normally provided by your ISP. Who registered our domain?You're probably thinking of somebody like "Adrian the IT guy" or "one of our trustees", but although one of these individuals may have pushed all the right buttons to start the process, the real movers behind the scenes would have been a dedicated domain registrar (someone like 123-reg.co.uk), or perhaps your chosen ISP (for instance demon.net). How to find outGo to any ISP or registrar like 123-reg.co.uk, search for the domain name (which should flag up as being taken), click on the link for further information and the contact details of the person who registered the domain will be revealed. Very useful if it was done some years ago. For more detail you can check at www.dnsreport.com which spews out a comprehensive report showing whose nameservers you rely on (perhaps your ISP's) and whether there are any problems with configuration. If there are serious problems, contact us and we can help sort them out. Where is our web site space?Your web site pages are located on a computer - in this case a web server - and, unless your organisation is into keeping its own physical web server running with all the attendant issues, your web services will normally be rented from another company (a web hoster) who piles web servers high in a big data centre. Like all other Internet-connected machines, that will have an IP number to which web surfers are directed as shown above. How to use nslookup C:\Documents and Settings\me> nslookup > www.coopsys.net Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.coopsys.net > exit How to find outMany companies provide their own free web lookups like this one at selfseo.com. Such lookups don't always work, as requests are increasingly obscured at a firewall to prevent ping attacks that can overwhelm a web serving (or nay other) machine. In these cases only DNS server results are shown. Another solution is to go to dnsstuff.com and employ the traceroute option which will additionally highlight all the machines that your request passes through before reaching its destination. The WHOIS lookup is also useful here for finding out contact information referred to above. Finally, if you are familiar with the Windows command line (Start | Run | type "cmd"), the nslookup utility is a useful IP finder too. A typical session is shown here (what you type shown in bold). More informationAs a final digression, it may be of interest to find the geographical location of a machine. Open www.ipaddresslocation.org and you are presented with a surprising amount of information about your machine and where it is located (or rather where the ISP is located), which operating system and browser you are running. Go further down the page and plug in an IP to the IP locator, or simply add on the end of the web address like this: Beware that sites like ipaddresslocation.org and dnsstuff.com are becoming increasingly busy so expect occasional connection problems. Learn more about domain names in InfoBulletin. -IB-
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2. Profits and pitfalls of a web forum
Is your web presence passive or active? Breath new life into your site. | ||
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Today's web sites are gradually falling into two groups: those where you can go and read something (passive) and those where you can go and do something (interactive). Building a new application (a fundraising game, an online publications catalogue) for a web site is no trivial undertaking, but there is one massively popular draw which does come under the heading of stuff-we-can-do-ourselves: namely a web forum. Humans like nothing better than a good old jaw and it's as easy to do that online now as anywhere else. A single forum can stimulate debate, attract people from outside the traditional circles of an organisation and raise awareness to garner campaigning muscle. Forum areas can be seeded with expert articles you have already published to get things going. However, you don't have to stick to just one – forums can be multi-layered. Aside from assigning specific forums to the main organisational groups such as ...
... most web forum applications have sufficient flexibility to allow overlap between those groups. The most obvious examples might be that staff or volunteers could come in on supporter forums to answer queries or partake in help lines. Open forums are another popular adjunct, where members of the public can join in. Frequently these areas encourage what are known as 'lurkers' - people who just hang around mostly reading, but one day may become potential supporters or activists. Web forum profits
Web forum pitfallsContrary to most IT projects - and just for a change - many of the problems are non-technical and more people-centred!
We got rightsKeeping control of the whole shooting match are moderators and forum designers; these people could be members of any of the above but have supreme rights to change the layout and edit the structure. Web forum hierarchies typically follow the top-down convention of:
Choosing what subject matter should go into these slots is a key decision and the best general guide is to approach as you would a web site: first map out which audiences you hope to attract. Under categories you might have "Beginners" and "Regulars", and a first stop for many folks is always "FAQs" (Frequently Asked Questions): the latter can be added to as the forum grows. Or you might choose to adopt your internal folder structure as a template with say "Admin", "Fundraising" and "Campaigns". Under these headings you can build forums, another area normally reserved for moderators and site-builders, otherwise the result will be an embarrassing jumble. Down at the topic level is where regular visitors can post opinions and reply to stuff already there. Where to find web forum applicationsMany Content Management Systems are beginning to bundle this kind of interactive module, but equally you can find web forum applications in Xoops and phpBB to name but two, or you can find the latter already hosted at Informe. Want to embark on a web forum? Ask us about it. -IB-
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3. Document folders need structured thinking
Is your folder structure fit for purpose or does it make you work around it? | ||
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Not-for-profits often have shed loads of sophisticated software for managing their data – databases for fund-raising, calendars for events, email for messages, spreadsheets for finance - but the tool they resort to most frequently for their documents is often the most badly organised: the folder system. The older folderIn the beginning was the word, and the first word began with the letter "A", so it was deemed. The term "directory" hailed from a time when fat telephone directories comprised volumes of carefully structured information - surnames laid out alphabetically, then by initial. Such tomes coined the word 'look-up' and the dedicated browser could often reveal the specialist needle in a haystack full of wall-to-wall companies. Thus when it came to print, there was only one way to organise lists of data and that was alphabetically. The new kid on the block, the "folder" arrived with filing cabinets and a more personal approach to sourcing of data. Folder was the term taken up with gusto by Microsoft's user-friendly marketing guys who gave folders a little yellow icon to empathise with end-users. They even added a few twists in Windows file management by allowing us to organise documents by date (what was I last working on?), by type (show me all the .doc files) and by folder location (list the Campaigns project folder). These attributes were even embedded in the Windows search facility allowing the PC to do the searching instead of the user having to trawl through the tree manually. Case study: a better folder system
IB spoke to Becky, Information Manager at a small charity ...
What sparked off the need to change the structure?Files were stored on people's own PC drives with directories in My Documents. When we moved it all to the new network, we ended up with personalised folders according to users' names and a few isolated projects. The structure was difficult to follow, it had built up over years, but we just adapted to it! Now we need to unify it for everybody including newcomers, so that anybody could find a document or publication they are looking for.How long did it take?We took stock at the beginning of the new year and did a 3-week internal consultation, which produced a proposal for the structure. Unfortunately it has sat there for about a month and a half (due to other pressures) but we hope to switch to it in the next 3 months. 'Cross-Over Day' will mean everyone going through documents checking they are in the right place.Did you choose a leader?Yes, me I suppose, in a facilitating role.How did you decide to model it?By discussing areas we all worked in, and deciding on the top level first like Admin, Finance, Projects, then the second levels down and so on. The ICT hub article was useful for advice which we followed.Did you publish a model of the structure?Yes, we have got that! The intention is to turn it into a document for guidance on how to add to the structure (without confusion).Early organisations took the directory or folder tree - inherited from their own hierarchical organisational tree - and squeezed their documents into it, whether appropriate or not. This was fine on a personal level where early finance officers were among the privileged few with a PC on the desk and who had total control of the information in that tree. The 1980s and 1990s however brought networks to the masses - not-for-profits included - and with them came the awkward issues of rights and who should have sight of which documents and editorial control. One size fits all?The reaction of many organisations has been to ignore completely the security and confidentiality benefits that rights management could bring and stick with the existing top-down folder structure that they inherited from long ago, and that's where a lot of them are still stuck today. We have probably all experienced the nightmares of repeated dates ... C:\AnnualReport 2006\summaries\2006\draft report.doc... or endlessly long paths ... H:\Projects\Financial budgets\2006\First Quarter\Main Project\Misc\Latest updates\Recent\ A totally open system (and some argue, a democratically fair one) is also totally open to abuse by 'ordinary users', such as viewing financial accounts, personal and medical information, pre-embargoed decisions by trustees, boards and press officers, editing of research 'owned' by other colleagues, and so on. Playing the jokerTo reshape the folder system towards one that prevents some of this abuse, what follows is usually a series or workarounds on a micro scale by individual users instead of macro scale by consensus. However users only employ the techniques that they understand, and each has its own serious drawbacks:
What is needed is a realisation that organisations and the way they work are less and less hierarchical, especially small and medium-sized ones, thus the structure may need to reflect these new practices, and a single hierarchical structure will rarely accommodate. Folder structures also need to be efficient - in other words intuitive, to avoid lots of 'drilling down' - and yet at the same time permit appropriate access to the right users. A moderate understanding of network rights management and its advantages is really beneficial here. Examples
A blanket application of new rights or privileges to such folders, if they were held in a single tree, would exclude lots of valid users arbitrarily. These are clear examples of where the structure has to expand sideways. Useful tool: Modelling with Excel Excel's spreadsheet may be a good tool for beginning the model of your structure; it's easy to edit cells, move them around and print them. The fill series feature (look up "fill" in Help) is a useful way to avoid lots of repetitive typing, but normally only repeats dates, days and numerical series, eg 2004, 2005, 2006. However this can be customised further in:
... so you could build custom series like Admin, Campaign, Finance, Project have them filled into cells with one click over and over. Do it collaborativelyDesigning a suitable structure does not have to be as tortuous as say, a web site where visitors motives are hard to determine; it is comparatively straightforward to ask staff and volunteers what they want out their folders. A solid structure is worth spending some time on though as it will save everyone a lot of time spent searching and duplicating files in the future. Scope the folder structure project:
The result might be:
Experienced network structure designers know of course that rights can be arranged to suit the group. Thus in the same way that H: is a different space for each individual, S: could be divided up to separate finance and HR functions completely, thus guaranteeing no overlap, assuming the two roles are fulfilled by separate staff. However for day-to-day ease of use and, especially for newcomers and volunteers, we should not lose sight of the fact we are not are out to build a new Dewey decimal system and that the structure should try to mirror expectations and avoid being deliberately obscure. Publishing the proposal for everyone to see is a good start and should be a benchmark to measure its success at the end. -IB-
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4. From goggle-box to Google-box
The bastion of broadcasting is under threat from allcomers, but will Internet TV kill society? | ||
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TV is going a lot more than digital. It is spreading outwards and sideways on to the Internet and that doesn't simply mean "BBC TV via BB" An outcry over the YouTube takeover by Google is manifesting itself in the form of complaints that Big Brother (the 1984 version) is muscling and in cleaning up a Bohemian space considered the territory of small film makers, home hobbyists or indeed anyone with anything to say on video. Stand the average net citizen in front of the camera to witness their daily net habits and the trend of 'Internet creep' is less astonishing: From soapbox to gogglebox Goggle box: the old British slang for TV set and its short history ... 
However the YouTube affair is also just another climax in one of many Internet start-up stories. Ask people like sysinternals.com, Giant AntiSpy and Lookout (an Outlook search plug-in) and we find they were all delighted to be snapped up by Microsoft - the ultimate slap on the back. A different kind of digital switchoverTimes they are a-changin' and none more so than for television. The likes of Tioti, Joost and modfilms.net are all start-ups champing at the TV bit (or more accurately the TV GigaByte) eager for a piece of the action - or comedy or horror or romance, they're not fussy. The one company, or corporation, struggling to keep its remit is the BBC. For many decades the Beeb has been free from the constraints of a single channel, but it's as if nothing had changed, because its output now competes with not hundreds, but thousands of channels as the surge of the Internet-broadcast wave crashes through the Broadcasting House revolving doors and into the foyer. How will society cope with one channel per person instead of just one channel? Already there are more web pages than people on the planet and already pictures and audio are heading the same way. Will human cultural integration break down and cease to engender coherent communication? Yet prime network TV continues to escalate in importance in a centralising sense; the sheer size of funds raised by a Live 8 event knocks thousands of other minor campaigns into a cocked hat; a wannabe-star can spawn a career merely by appearing on a Big Brother-style reality show. No jam tomorrow At the end of March the BBC was forced to suspend its BBC Jam educational service for children after the European Commission received complaints over unfair impact the commercial sector. More details.
To Beeb or not to BeebThe BBC is fighting back - or going with the flow depending on your take - with its own recent deal with Google-YouTube, comprising entertainment and news channels, both with and without ads, with the specific aim of driving traffic back to the BBC's own website. Channel streams that carry adverts will be controversial, because they have the potential to compete with UK commercial stations and in many instances can be seen outside the UK only, such as advertising-funded news clips; UK clicks will receive a "no access" response to such ads – a form of censorship perhaps? Yet the BBC Worldwide YouTube page will show banner adverts, and maybe adverts in the run-up to a video clip too, viewable by all in the UK; this line is claimed to be in step with existing Worldwide Beeb policy where 'magazine' channels include advertising. The BBC has also declared a partial amnesty on hunting down thousands of pirated clips on YouTube where BBC promotional interests might be served. 
Playing catch-upThe second phenomenon is that events are no longer necessarily received in real time, or indeed the same time as all the other viewers, again an aspect that that many people are familiar with, if not actually aware of as a given trend. Catch-up TV and Podcasts allow us to consume media as and when we want, rather than when the broadcaster transmits it, whether through PVR-type (Personal Video Recorder) programme-scheduling software on home media devices or through on-demand and repeat services like Sky. The BBC’s own catch-up television proposal is BBC iPlayer, formerly called iMP (Integrated Media Player or Interactive Media Player), which will be usable by people without Microsoft Windows, to replace the existing RealPlayer-based radio and other streamed content. Throwing the TV across the room .... and much furtherIn addition to time-shifting TV with recorders, we now have place-shifters too with the likes of the famous Slingbox, Netgear's Digital Entertainer and Sony's Location Free Base Station. Such boxes permit us to move our viewing habits around the home, the office or even the world. That means watching your favourite TV series or a rugby match or a keynote speech across the other side of the globe by connecting remotely into your place-shifting box (and therefore your TV subscription), or recording it automatically to suit your current time zone. The new TV revolution is already upon us and we may be about to discover free speech in a big way, but are we losing the essence of common parlance? -IB-
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5. Microsoft Fingerprint Reader
Biometric print readers are becoming commodity items to make the replacement of passwords with fingerprints a pushover. | ||
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In the beginning was the depressionThe traditional millstone of the medieval jailer's keys is a burden that today's net-citizens have inherited, transmuted into the stewardship of a myriad accounts, both virtual and actual. To function in hyperspace and office space, we must now memorise a plethora of usernames, passwords, email addresses and ids to access the virtual information cells we create in our lives. 
Anything that lightens this mental load has to be a good thing and here's one for under £25. Poke your digit on the hotspot and - bingo! - you're logged in. Fingerprint readers are hardly news any more, but that fact that they have reached commodity status means it's a no-brainer purchase. Benefits are:
Press for actionMicrosoft's setup is just a matter of plugging into a USB port and running the supplied CD to install Digital Persona Password Manager. Following the restart, this is the last time you will have to type a password to log in to Windows. Finish off the configuration by choosing which hand, which finger and scan that finger 4 times for verification, during which the reader lights up on each touch with an effect reminiscent of sci-fi films. Fingertip controlFrom here on there is a fingerprint reader icon the icon/system tray. Web site logins (eg Amazon, Outlook Web Access can be associated with the password manager too; simply visit the site and the one-touch menu pops up a dialogue box, where you enter your login information for each site. Next time you visit, a gentle touch on the biometric reader gets the software to fill in your credentials in the pop up box automatically. Note that there is a disclaimer during software installation emphasising that this reader should not be considered a security feature to protect sensitive data and that strong passwords are a better method to guard financial information and the like. Microsoft's fingerprint reader is also available built into other keyboard and mouse combinations in addition to the stand-alone option here. Contacts-IB-
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6. Q&A: - Outlook Move-to-folder tips
Question 
Hi Mark, Now that I have a screen with a much higher resolution, the folder icons in Outlook are tiny. This means I keep dragging messages to the wrong folder and losing them, especially where folders are deep – like our massive public folders! Is there any way I can make message filing easier? | ||
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There sure is! And this is common but overlooked problem. Dropping an email message into Outbox instead of Old can have radically different consequences!As a fallback don't forget the Ctrl-Z button combination (pull down Edit | Undo Move) so you can get back to where you started before you lost the message/appointment/note or whatever. 
And so to one of Outlook's most important and underrated features – the Move button. So simple and yet perhaps the top time-saver of all its features, and it's been there since the 2000 version. Of course the Ctrl-Shift-V combo is still around to manage items but you still have to navigate to a folder. Whether you are in the message list or viewing a message in a separate reader pane, a small yellow button shows in the top toolbar that reveals the last 10 folder destinations in the order you visited them with one click. One more click pops your message where you choose with no hassle. It even works across other (generic) mailboxes that you may share. If you always view messages with a preview pane below the message list, your problem ends here. However if you open messages in a separate pane, a little toolbar editing may be in order to make things perfect. Almost the only failing is that the Move-to-Folder icon 'jumps' around by default: on the inbox view you find it turns up to the left of the Reply buttons, while in the message reader window it's way over to the right of the Reply and Forwarding buttons. The Move to Folder button is a similar enough yellow to the Create Rule button so we end up clicking on that and having to cancel all the time. This really destroys intuitive mouse-clicking, so let's fix the placement of both the Move to Folder and Delete buttons in the message reader view and keep them on the left all the time.
Now the Move icons turn up in roughly the same place. -IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - make a link to a Public Folder
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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