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Allegheny B&B – December 2009 Meeting Notes

This was our last month meeting at ACHIEVA on the South Side.  There are no Bagels & Bytes meetings in January (except for the Westmoreland group).  For the 2010 schedule, visit The Bagels & Bytes Calendar (including directions).

Here are the various resources and topics discussed during this month’s meeting:

  • Google Wave beta – several of us are playing around with this new social media/communications tool
  • Keeping equipment inventory
    • Built-in software if available
    • Need to get accounting involved at some point
    • Simple Access database and assign tracking tags/numbers to pieces of equipment
    • Some attempting in SharePoint
    • Might use interns
    • Have to stay on top of it
    • Spiceworks.com – has inventory & help desk functionality – free version or pay if don’t like advertisements
  • DonorPro fundraising software by TowerCare Technologies
    • Several B&B people moving to it soon
    • Reasonable cost (about half the monthly cost of Razor’s Edge)
    • DonorPro does data conversion too
  • Talked about NPOs’ reluctance to do cloud computing
  • Email archiving
  • Google software/products
    • Can now set up Gmail with organization’s own domain name
    • Lots of other Google collaboration tools besides email and calendar
    • Google now has shared folders – can set permissions user-by-user
  • How to track time when employees start working from home
    • Some allow exempt employees to work remotely but not non-exempt
    • Time tracking is a mgmt. and HR issue, not a tech issue
  • Have to prioritize tech projects and focus on the most important first – so don’t do all of them half-ways

Our next meeting will be held at Amani International Coffee House on the North Side, on February 3, 2010.  Please note that we are now holding our meeting from 8:30 – 10 am each month.

Downtown B&B – September 2009 Meeting Notes

Once again, we met at the Bayer Center office in the Regional Enterprise Tower in downtown Pittsburgh. Here are the wealth of resources that were discussed during our meeting:

Many thanks to Norm Mast of Lutheran Service Society (who has more freeware in his brain’s memory cells than is probably healthy for any one person 🙂 for many of the items on this list!

ONE LAST THING…

The Allegheny group came up with the idea of having our December holiday party B&B meeting at a fun place – ROBOWORLD!  All B&B groups will be invited to this session.  I will be working with Joe McLaughlin, who worked on the exhibit there, to see about making this happen!

Our next meeting will be held at the Bayer Center’s downtown office, on October 8.  Please note that we are now holding our meeting from 8:30 – 10 am each month.

 

The Bagels & Bytes 2009 Calendar (including directions) is here.