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January 2007 Choosing Windows Vista, Phone-to-Calendar synchronisation, Blu-ray v. HD DVD, How full is your inbox?, How safe is that web site?
August 2006 Dell 9G PowerEdge server overview, Shop online? You'd have to be certified!, ADSL to the power of 8, Control your server 100ft away, Computing and telephony converge, Where are my Outlook pictures?
December 2005 Fly away on my cell phone, $100 laptop, Email etiquette: subject for discussion, lastminute IT strategy
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We will close earlier at 5pm on Monday 24th December and all day on Tuesday 25th December, Wednesday 26th December and Tuesday 1st January. Normal Co-Operative Systems support services will be available on all other days. Seasonal greetings to all clients and readers and very best wishes for 2008.
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1. You heard it here first: The CEO Blog
Talk the talk, blog the job | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
It's the dress-down-Friday of journalism and everybody's doing it, even the archetypal IT-illiterate chief exec. Blogging: What's in it for the writer?A CEO blog can certainly attract an audience, and probably a fresh one at that. It has the promise of the insider track, an insight into the thinking of the minds at the top. Even though most readers are savvy enough to realise there will be few such "you saw it here first" revelations in this kind of space, they are still drawn towards these jottings because of the potential power driving them. A blog can be a vehicle to clear your thoughts: a time to summarise and make concise your organisational plans and directions, clean the fluff out of the strategy. Even if you never publish it.  
It doesn't have to be a chore. Blogging isn't a deadline-driven magazine, indeed there's no commitment there will ever be another one. Your blog can be rattled off (though beware of being too hasty) on a laptop, or from a mobile phone on the spur of the moment. It could even be withdrawn later, though many search engine caches will have by then captured anything sufficiently controversial. A blog can be a space to show the character and heart of your charity, as some have said "an organisation staffed by people not robots". Of course it's also publicity, and if you're of a mind that all publicity is good, you can't beat a blog - unless nobody reads it of course. Blogging: What's in it for the reader?Some of the characteristics to consider are:
If these points come through for the reader, they will recognise the CEO's musings as a reality check and come back for more. They may learn more about the spirit of your organisation than could ever be gleaned from the formal tones of a web site (what does that say about your web site?) With suitable blogging software, readers can also become writers, in other words they can leave comments, stimulating debate around the blogged topic. Good for you, good for them, excellent for your mission. The B-wordBe wary of your blog becoming too corporate and de-personalized. The thoughts from the top are exactly what readers want to hear even though you may not wish to share them all. Otherwise it's the Dragon's Den syndrome: stick a bunch of one-time entrepreneurs under the glare of the media spotlight and suddenly they become uncharacteristically risk-averse. Followed in swift succession by bored audiences switching off. Make it clear who you are. The blog world is filled with personal comments made by anonymous, timid authors. Post too often and readers will fatigue. Unless you are simultaneously as compelling and erudite as Stephen Fry's offerings, keep it sweet, short and not too frequent, say weekly at most. Barring a sudden influx of funds as a result of your jottings, trustees will begin to re-assess your next appraisal if you start blogging daily. If the web designer has indeed created a blog slot for you, either use it or get it deleted. Don't let it be one of those that's gone missing. Trackbacks - the domino effectThis is where blogging goes exponential. Write something revolutionary or revelational on your blog and it could be picked up by searches and linked to thousands of other bloggers' - who may either heartily agree or disagree with yours - who effectively provide a link to you. This trackbacking feature is so powerful, it once threatened to overwhelm Google's search engines, with trackbacks appearing so ubiquitously at the top of results that the giant had to downgrade the importance of blog trackbacks in their algorithms. Get started by having a browse through blogging tools and check out some examples of the medium. Blogging and search toolsBlogging tools, plus an A-Z list Blogger.com - probably the most well-known of blogging software, another Google acquisition Bloglines – keeps track of multiple Blogs del.icio.us - upload, store and share bookmarks Technorati – well-known blog search engine Blogroll or bogroll?See how of many of these not-for-profit and NGO sector blogs fit your criteria for a charismatic, irresistible read ... Clarissa Baldwin, CEO DogsTrust Frequent and forthright blog by Jamie McCoy on issues surrounding homelessness Greenpeace campaigners make waves with offshore blogs Variety of bloggers at the Overseas Development Institute Oxfam's generation why blog Not enough time to write? Some CEOs have taken to video-blogging and micro-blogging. For a large well-organised list of UK not-for-profit blog links, see the VolResource charity blogroll at: -IB- |
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2. First contact! Web form design made easy
Online web form creators reviewed. We ask the questions! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Forms kill spamMost web designers and a goodly number of users must have clicked by now that placing an email address unprotected on your web site will almost guarantee a regular stream of spam to that address. From your perspective, it's not the only disadvantage however, since respondents to your contact address will hardly ever frame their query or reply in a way that makes dealing with it efficient. Even getting them to put say "How much is the campaigning pack?" into the subject of an email instead of "I was just wondering ..." feels like pushing water uphill. Receiving a hundred or so of these vague meanderings a day becomes an email management nightmare. With a properly designed contact form, the potential passing trade can be steered in an orderly fashion through a query "Choose area from publications / donations / campaigning / volunteering?" or "How did you hear about us?" and so on. 
True to formSuddenly the communications from your web visitors is structured and the resulting emails can even be routed seamlessly to the relevant people without human intervention - and without heaps of junk mail pouring into the organisation. However, web contact forms were traditionally awkward to design, requiring not only some knowledge of the relevant HTML syntax for the <form> tag , but also a degree of familiarity with web server interaction. For example, the popular formmail.pl Perl script has you digging around in the web server to find the path to its Perl and sendmail installations, before you have even arrived at the testing and debugging stage to ensure form emails actually arrive at your inbox. Fortunately, a crop of hosted forms providers have emerged on the web scene in recent years to take away all the drudgery. Now, with simplified, kid-friendly interfaces, designing contact forms can be a matter of a few clicks, very little typing and almost no technical knowledge. Indeed, Freedback claims you can be up and running in 8 minutes. How hosted web forms workInstead of burying (and attempting to hide) an email address on your web site, simply get someone else to do it. A link redirects the completed form to the provider, they process it and turn the results into data that can be emailed back to you. The organisation's contact address is hidden within your account as are all the settings for the forms. Steps to creating your own web form
We took a couple of forms creators and submitted them head-to-head.
Clearly there is a trade-off between these two providers: Freedback goes for allowing lots of questions, but not many field types and only one form, while Wufoo permits up to 3 forms with a maximum of 10 questions on each, though with a huge array of question/field types. The latter is useful when combined with its validation routines so that the form can, say automatically check that an email entry really does conform to the syntax of an email address, like name@domain.com. The Wufoo web designer interface is a slick affair and they have clearly put some considerable effort into creating drag-n-drop features so that even a complete beginner can craft a web form that looks attractive as well as functioning the way they expect. For instance, the Themes section permits alteration of form styles in a consistent manner for items such as logo, background, typography, borders, shadows and buttons. You can do this within Freedback, but only by editing your final web page directly, for which you may need HTML and CSS skills. We're into a slightly grey area here in that Freedback tells you specifically only to use their form designer, which obviously means they can generate consistent HTML code, but you are quite limited as to how the final form style appears in this case. Paid extrasBoth providers have upgrade plains starting at US$9/month, in return for which submitters lose the obligatory advert promotions of the provider site towards the end of a submission and some interesting additional features loom into view. The most useful fallback is that of customer support and although these are US-based toll-free numbers, Wufoo do at least provide a half-way house with a users forum (even on the free plan) so some self-help is at least possible. The Wufoo site has extended its provision to include SSL (secure submissions) and integration of payments for those wanting to take the process all the way through to purchase of catalogue items or online donations. We are asking the questions!Allow the greatest amount of time possible for designing and testing your forms. Arriving at the final web form will be a tedious converging process, involving much pretending to be Jo Bloggs, Mr. Bloggs, Bloggs Jnr, and ultimately just blogg1, blogg2 when you get bored. Only by testing whether the resulting emails produce what you expect does a beautifully presented, seamlessly functional web page rise out of the contact form mire. Although at the start of even the most meticulous design process it may seem impossible that anything has been omitted, the convergent testing process soon inevitably reveals someone has overlooked something. Check through our list of tips.
Staying on good formFinally, as with any hosted service, one has to ask "How stable is it?" Relying on someone else's provision 24x7 means no service from them equals no service for you, and we have known forms providers to go belly-up on the basis of one single outage. Freedback claims to employ 4 servers to circumvent collapse from hardware failures, while Wufoo state their servers [number not given] are "backed up onsite and offsite, every 12 hours in Toronto and every 24 hours in Virginia". If experiences prove positive with the free services shown here, it may be worth upgrading to a paid plan. A quick tot-up of how much time you spend dealing with queries via the web site, or queries that could be better handled via a web contact form, might reveal you could end up quids in. Contacts-IB-
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3. Email to SMS
Give up grappling with a tiny keypad when sending texts to mobile workers. Use your computer instead. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Not everyone is available on email all of the time, a key feature of mobile workers and those in the field or on the road. Even where they're in phone contact, verbal communication may be haphazard at best, being subject to call break-up, external noise and the whether the caller has the physical or private space to take a call at the time. There are times like these when a good old text message is just the best answer. Sending a lot of texts often soon gets to be a strain, however. It's a strain on the the poor old thumbs and might be pushing the budget of one individual's mobile account. Time to get an email-to-SMS gateway. 
Using a free Outlook Addin or direct from a web browser means office workers can type emails effortlessly on a normal keyboard and have them converted to SMS texts so time-critical information arrives at mobile phone-toting workers in a way they can handle - maybe hanging precariously on to pole in a noisy train vestibule or in a public space at a conference - or anywhere else that's less than ideal for voice chat. Personal budgetary constraints also get some relief since an organisational account can be set up and all the costs of texts end up in one costing centre instead of mounting up as some poor employee's expenses bill. The key to this is an email gateway or service like that from IntelliSoftware. The texts themselves are not free of course, since mobile operators always levy charges, even for the basic 160-character staple of our communication lives. However, bulk text purchases bought in blocks can bring prices down to between 4p and 8p per message. 
Skype users of course will already be familiar with sending SMS texts but the equivalent UK cost doesn't drop below 6.4p per message and may not be suitable for sending large quantities. An SMS gateway also adds the advantage of keeping all your contacts within Outlook instead of having to migrate them to the Skype application, although the Tools | Import Contacts process and the View | Show Outlook Contacts menu has made Skype conversions more seamless than in earlier days. The free Outlook Addin certainly maintains the consistency of a familiar interface, especially when SMS-able mobile numbers are already present in the Outlook contacts or address book. What's more SMS replies from mobile workers in the filed come back into your Outlook inbox without needing a dedicated mobile receiving number. By comparison, Skype asks for your own mobile number as a sending identifier and routes return SMS texts to that, so SMS 'conversations' end up in two places, whereas the SMS gateway method keeps everything within Outlook - just as with emails that have been sent and received. For those on Macs and Linux-based systems, the browser-based interface achieves the same function if you want to deliver messages speedily to your knights of the road. Contacts-IB-
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4. How do I click this button?
Is the the lost art of self-help truly lost? | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
When was the last time you actually Read The Manual? Well, if it's any consolation, I can't remember either. The environmental taboo of chopping down trees to create the ultimate software guide didn't suddenly usher in a wave of ultra user-friendly programs 
When it comes to learning software applications these days, people just don't read all the accompanying guff, never mind however carefully presented the included help or PDFs or the web site. Is that we are bogged down by humdrum work, or the pressure of deadlines and the last thing we want landing on the desktop is yet another feature-packed application with a bloated instruction book? 'Darn right!' - are the words you can hear poised on a chorus of a thousand lips. Sooner or later this lack of prep spawns a series of tetchy "How do I get the ... back?" or "What happened to my ...?" support calls, which in turn beget an equally vehement volley of RTFMs from the IT department - at least from unsympathetic ones. Curiosity never killed any cool catsJust 10 minutes spent exploring the pull-downs – the menus at the top of most software – rapidly imparts an insight into the features on offer. It doesn't matter whether it's Word or Outlook or the inner depths of Mozilla Firefox that you are plumbing, the principle is the same. There's no need to remember even one per cent of those cascading grey boxes, but once the hint of something new ("Aha, so it can do text flowing around pictures then?") is tucked away in your sub-conscious, it's a handy aid-mémoire when the inevitable "How do I do that?" query arises. For example: The answer to all these becomes an emphatic YES, because you remember spotting it before somewhere, however fleetingly. Another favourite tip in the self-reliance armoury is to head straight on over to the Tools | Options menu contained in just about every program. Spend just 3 minutes browsing the settings here (don't change anything just yet, leave the fiddling until later) and you discover how to undo what that cryptic setup wizard installed. More crucially, for long term efficiency, you may find new shortcuts and develop a clearer understanding of what your software beast is capable of. Above all, a tangible sense of self-assuredness will eventually pervade your command of the software you use most, and even some of the software you hardly touch - go on explore a little! And all without 'reading the manual'. Still not convinced? You are destined to remain in the spoon-fed category of IT learners. Resign yourself to being whisked off to the equivalent of the software Early Learning Centre or practising some diplomacy in your calls for help. -IB- |
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5. Hand IT over. Or else!
Failure to hand over at holiday breaks causes delays or worse. | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
Break up, not break downWe seem to have a surge of support calls that happen at the start of the main holiday season, Christmas and Easter. It's an all too common scenario: the regular person in your organisation who is responsible for IT on site - we'll call him Joe, and he's no doubt already demob-happy - forgets to do a mini-handover to a colleague. Thus Day 1 of Joe's pleasure becomes Day 1 of everyone else's panic. Things like backup checks, email maintenance and file purges stop happening. Which all those underlying services come to a grinding halt. So this is a just a seasonal reminder to be of of good cheer to everyone, including your colleagues. Make diary entries at the start of the Christmas season, Easter and summer holidays to remind people to do IT handovers. Season's Greetings, Joe. -IB-
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6. Q&A: How to sort Excel in columns
Question 
Hi Mark, On of our volunteers collected an ever growing list of donors in an Excel spreadsheet and it's now difficult to sort out who last donated and how much or how often. Is there any way of sorting them out so it's all easier to view? | ||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
There certainly is, but long term you should think about moving the data to a database, perhaps Access in the first instance, since database applications are purpose-made for sorting and other querying functions. In the meantime though you can employ Excel sorting functions (also available in other spreadsheets like OpenOffice and Ability) to sort particular columns and give you at-a-glance views of your donors. So for example, you could generate a list of alphabetically-sorted names and shuffle them so that the rows are sorted by date and then sub-sorted by amount. That way you can target how to execute phone calls, send out flyers, or whatever your fundraising strategy dictates. The key thing to make life easier is to have a named row of headers at the top of your table, as in the example here.
The table stays in the same spot but rearranges the columns, in this case by date then amount. This can be done as many times as you like. Don't forget that Ctrl-Z will undo these too if it looks a muddle. Note that sorting in Excel is not dynamic. In other words, if you add another row at the bottom, say with a donor called Patel, that row will stay there irrespective of the date and donation values until you implement the sort process again. If you need to use more than 3 sort options or want to see columns resort themselves as you add new data, then you have probably already outgrown the spreadsheet as a suitable application and should export straight to a database asap.
-IB-
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Clicks of the Trade - Forward HTML emails minus pictures
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | ||||
| More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away |
-IB-
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