achieva

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – November 2017

Prize winners at Bagels & Bytes

The winners of this month’s prize giveaways!

We met at ACHIEVA for the last time this year. Thank you again to Nicole and the ACHIEVA staff for hosting us!

Our meeting in December will be the annual holiday party at Dave & Buster’s at the Waterfront on Friday, December 8 from 1-4 pm. We will have our regular meeting over lunch (everyone orders off the menu and pays individually this time), then do a “techie white elephant” gift exchange (bring a geeky wrapped gift under $10, feel free to look for odd stuff in your tech closet to wrap) and then we’ll play a few games including our annual skee-ball tourney (Cindy will bring a few prizes for the winners).

The reminder email will go out next week, so keep an eye out and RSVP for the meeting on the Bayer Center’s website or on Meetup.com when you see it.

Here are the notes and resources from this month’s meeting:

On-Premise vs. Cloud Server

Data Analysis Software

Coax to Fiber

  • Coax (for example, like Comcast) – speeds are never consistent, disconnects frequently in high usage
  • Coax providers tell you the minimum speed they provide, fiber providers tell you the maximum speed they provide
  • Coax is generally faster, but there are many things that can affect speed
  • Verizon and DQE also have fiber
  • DQE owns the fiber lines
  • Check packet shaping on routers/prioritize traffic to keep more important going
  • Check into Level 3 Communications (owns the Pittsburgh backbone)

Click Dimensions

  • Click Dimensions – mass email marketing tool that connects to MS Dynamics 365 CRM
  • Ask about 30 day trial
  • Want to be able to connect to database
  • Email templates

NTEN Tech Accelerate

Remote IT Management

Lynda.com

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – October 2017

Bagels & Bytes attendees holding a meeting

Meetup Info

We had a great meetup at ACHIEVA earlier this month! Thank you to Nicole and the staff there for hosting us!

Our next meeting is in the same location on Wednesday, November 1, 8:30 – 10 am. Be sure to also mark your calendar for the December B&B Holiday Party Meetup at Dave & Busters on Friday, December 8 from 1 – 4 pm. Lunch meeting, followed by a Techie White Elephant gift exchange, then some gaming, including our annual skee-ball contest!

Here are the notes and resources from this month:

When IT is kept out of the loop

  • Sometimes tech staff are deliberately or inadvertently kept out of the loop on IT-related decisions (example: when HR staff choose a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) and don’t involve tech staff)
  • One theory is that IT represents a large expense in an organization and not involving tech staff keeps costs down.
  • Another theory is it simply boils down to organizational politics.

Why should passwords be changed frequently?

  • Is every 90 days too often?
  • The network admins in our group don’t think so.
  • Financial auditors will actually recommend changing passwords more frequently, such as every 60 days.

Can you over-customize a database?

  • Ask yourself, is the database overly complex because it needs to be or is it because business processes are overly complicated and affecting workflows in the database accordingly.
  • An interesting exercise – think about what CRM you would go with if yours blew up tomorrow and was permanently un-usable.
  • Fractured systems are the worst thing of all to deal with.

Software resources mentioned

  • Paycom – newer company doing HRIS/payroll software.
  • Mass email tools:
    • Vertical Response – good nonprofit rates (first 10K emails per month are free) but gets blacklisted a lot.
    • Constant Contact – costs more per month, but does have nonprofit pricing. Get a discount for paying for the whole year in advance. Doesn’t get blacklisted as often. Integrates with Salesforce, including the new Lightning interface.
    • MailChimp – good and not too expensive. Doesn’t get blacklisted as often. Does not integrate well with Salesforce Lightning interface.
    • Emma – possibly most costly of all, but also has the most features for marketing and fundraising included.
    • Google Groups – not necessarily a mass email tool, but can do group messaging with it.
    • Click Dimensions – works with MS Dynamics CRM in particular.

 

Bagels & Bytes Meeting Notes – September 2017

Bagels & Bytes attendees around the table, talking and laughing togetherAbout the Meetup

This was our last visit to Jewish Residential Services for this year.  (A big thank you to Paula and the JRS staff for hosting us!!) Next month, we will be back at ACHIEVA in the South Side on Oct. 4.

Hey…TechNow stuff…

If you’ve not signed up for the 2017 TechNow conference yet, be sure to do it within the next 2 weeks, before the price goes up!  www.technowconference.org

Here are the notes and resources from this month’s meeting:

Expense report software

  • Concur – $1,000/month; need web connector
  • Expensify – cannot bill against grants, but does have a QuickBooks connector available; $9/user/month
  • Lots of people are still processing expense reports via spreadsheets
  • Unit4 – variety of functions, payroll, expenses, etc.
  • ADP – has an expense report module called RUN
  • MITC tracks payroll and HR related items

Phone conferencing/bridge tools

  • One attendee looking at Zoom; less expensive than GotoMeeting; saves meetings to the cloud; price based on # of participants
  • Skype is another option, but sometimes board and staff struggle with using it
  • WebEx – similar package; stores all meetings so anyone can login and view them
  • Recommend regardless of software choice – set up some “practice” meetings prior to any important meetings (like staff or board meetings) to let people join the online meeting and work out tech bugs, get accustomed to the interface, etc.
  • Another recommendation is to mute participants on really large meetings so less background noise.

Rolling Out a New Database

  • Training is crucial
  • Walkthough all aspects of the database
  • In the first training session, go over the basics; then go deeper in subsequent sessions
  • List of procedures is a good idea – someone said “list the chapters of the book you’re going to write” meaning at least establish the headings you will need for your training/documentation/manual
  • Roll out training to power users first
  • Consider who will be doing the training – not everyone is a trainer, even if they are savvy about the software
  • Have trainees help write the user manual
  • Build the training manual as if the person reading it know nothing about the software
  • For Salesforce in particular, you can set up a practice sandbox that is a replica of the exact real database

Billing to Allegheny County

  • An interest was expressed by multiple people for batch billing software that works with Allegheny County’s billing system
  • None exists that anyone can think of

Google for Nonprofits