Welcome to Technology Corner!
This section of the website is dedicated to helping organizations utilize technology more effectively in order to better fulfill their mission.
In my experience, organizations that are creative and flexible in their application of technology get the best "bang for the buck". For example, sometimes using a particular application, service, or piece of hardware for something other than its original purpose will allow an organization to "leap frog" in productivity, cost savings, or level of service. In modern parlance, this is called "thinking outside of the box".
A classic example of the IT staff of an organization thinking outside of the box is the Selby Botanical Gardens. In late 2003, Colin Boyle (the Director of IT at Selby) showed me how his organization was using Terminal Services as their primary desktop on all of their computers in their main office. I hadn't heard of this before. Up to this point, I had only known of Terminal Services being used to give branch offices or remote workers access to critical applications housed in the main office. Using Terminal Services for the primary desktop (i.e. email, web-browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) in the main office sounded like an idea out of the left field. Colin reported that this allowed him to leverage old hardware. He was able to run modern applications efficiently on old hardware (Pentium 133MHz PCs, nonetheless!). This saved him big bucks in hardware and in labor.
We helpd the Community Foundation of Sarasota County (CFSC) follow Selby's lead in the summer 2004. At the time, they had a hodge podge fleet of aging PCs and were in need of a lot of upgrades. Instead, we used a server that was donated to CFSC by Arthur Andersen to setup a Terminal Services server, and we hosted all of their applications on it. Not only did they get to continue running those old desktop PCs without upgrading, but it gave a standardized desktop for everyone. They also gained in IT labor efficiency because an update to an application has to only be applied on the Terminal Services server instead of 20 PCs. Another great benefit is that all of the users' personal data was backed up when the Terminal Services server was backed up (email, documents, etc). If someone's hard drive suddenly died, there wouldn't be any missing spreadsheets, contacts, etc. This was one of the best IT-related plays that we've made to date. Hats off to Colin Boyle and the staff at Selby!
In the upper right corner, you'll notice a section that's labeled "Tech Pages". This will allow you to navigate to all of the pages in this section of the web site. Here's a brief break-down of those pages:
- Tech Corner Home Page
- That's this page.
- It contains upcoming technology events.
- Nonprofit Technology Resources
- This is self-explanatory!
- Cost Effective Solutions
- This covers applications, technologies, and hardware that are either free, very inexpensive, or save any organization (not just nonprofits) a lot of money in the long run.
- Application Support Page
- This contains procedures and solutions to errors that CFSC has come across with its applications. This was built primarily for their internal use. However, other organizations might use some of the same applications so we opened this page to the world.
- Van's Technology Blog
- I post here about technology-related issues that I've had to deal with.
- IT Forum
- Post your questions, observations, and helpful hints here!
- Information Technology Companies
- This is a list of information technology companies in the Sarasota area that I recommend.
Do you know of a good resource that you would like to see added to this site? Great! Please email me (van@vangor.net).
Thanks,
Van