Remote Access via iPhone and iPod Touch

Logmein now has a version of Ignition for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Logmein continues to provide terrific value for remote access. We're using it extensively, with a combination of the free version for most workstations and LogMeIn IT Reach for our servers and critical workstations. Ignition is the desktop client which is slightly more convenient than accessing your Logmein computers from a web page.

Revisiting

After more than two years, a former and much loved non-profit client called for some help in sorting out their donor database. That's another story which may be worth telling, but I was interested in seeing how they have weathered the economic downturn, and how some of the networking decisions that we took some years ago have held up. They have a main office and several field offices scattered among three counties. They have about 55 employees.

1. By the time I had left, most of field offices had a broadband connection. That work was completed, and each office now has a DSL broadband connection, either from a local ISP, or from Fairpoint (the company who bought the Verizon landline and consumer data service in the three northern N.E. states). After working with it for a couple days, I'd say performance is OK.. although today, curiously, there was a twenty minute outage.
   
   
2. With broadband available, they how have remote access software going to EVERY computer in EVERY office, as well as their central file server. Much desktop maintenance that required an on-site visit, can now be accomplished over the wire.
   
   
3. Electronic mail accounts are hosted by the local internet service provider. People use Outlook or Outlook Express as their desktop eMail client....and access their eMail account when away from the office via webmail.
   
   
4. They refreshed their desktop hardware with Dell Optiplexes that were donated by a local large employer. Although the machines are hand-me-downs, they are more than adequate for eMail, web browsing, and running the database application. The donor also gave them several laser printers that were only a few years old. Everyone is running XP, with Office 2007. (Without prompting, they said that Office 2007 is fine.) They have Norton Anti-Virus which is managed from the file server. No less than three of the staff said, in casual conversation... "well, I do have a Mac at home". I nodded toward my Macbook, running Parallels, wondering if this turns out to be a longer term gig, if I will need to get a new Windows laptop.
   
   
5. Their Dell file server is probably going on five years; but it is built like a tank, with RAID drives, and the original HP backup tape system. They have HP Procurve 2124 ethernet switches, and HP continues to keep replacing them under a lifetime warranty, when the fans go bad. I think we've replaced two or three switches with this client, and a couple of them with other clients. It takes one phone call.
   
   
6. Several old battles were, well, old, if not forgotten. They have made their peace with a state-mandated performance data application which gave us all fits for years. The Executive Director attributes this success to attentive support from the state agency which mandated the system.
   
   
7. If there is one especially popular non-business application being used by the staff, it is streaming audio. In fact, today, the first indication that there was a glitch in the internet connection was when a staff member came in and asked why her "radio" wasn't working.
   

In short, it Just Works. I think this is attributable to the existing staff who have educated themselves over the years, and new staff who have come on board with full expectations of a functioning network and desktop workstation and how to use it. Add in some longstanding support from management who recognize the value of investing in technology and training, and the efforts of the current part-time network manager who keeps it all humming.

NPower - Network Documentation Template

NPower Seattle has a Network Documentation Template which is in Word. This is a great start for documenting your computer network. The file is called SBS2003template.doc which suggests it might have been modified by one supplied by Microsoft, and it includes inserted Visio files to show the networking diagrams. If you are a MS shop this will work out of the box. If not, you can easily modify it in OpenOffice, or Pages, or whatever. The object of documenting your network is not necessarily perfection...but to have something to give you a clue when things start going haywire.

Call Centers from Hell and Customer Contempt

Especially during a recession, it amazes me the utter contempt company call centers show toward their customers. I spend a lot of time on calls with technical support people, and it remains as irritating as ever to get to them. Once I get a live person, however, I can usually calm down.

I really hate hearing that "This call may be monitored or recorded for training or quality control purposes". Especially right at the outset of a call. Maybe for my broker... (what broker?) when giving financial instructions. For all the "training" that is going on sitting in phone tree hell doesn't seem to be getting any easier. And quality control purposes? It makes me uneasy that I'm being recorded at all.

On hold, I really hate hearing every 15 seconds that "We appreciate your patience, and thank you for waiting during this brief delay". and "We know that you are very busy, we appreciate your call". Or worse, blabbing on about the web site, or the new product, or alternate ways to contact us, or whatever. These constant interruptions makes it impossible to concentrate on other work while waiting. What ever happened to playing Vivaldi and not inserting commercial messages?

While there are "secret" phone numbers floating around the internet for various services, I can't imagine a company would want these internal numbers published; they would get spammed quickly.

So, I'm holding for Fairpoint right now, and have had 5 dumb "Thank you for holding messages" in the previous minute.
"Thank you for holding, your call will be answered in just a moment"
"We know your time is important, and appreciate your patience while on hold"
"Every effort is being made to ensure that your wait is as short as possible... Thank you"
"Thank you for holding, someone will be right with you."
"Your call is very important to us. Thank you for waiting and bearing with us during this brief delay".

And then the cycle starts again. All this accompanied by ear-splitting muzak (tacky fake FM-synthesized saxophones.)

Odds and Sods

Going Aerial

Smashing Magazine has a collection of images taken from above and links to additional collections and tips for aerial photography.

There are a couple of tutorials over at Make Magazine's web site for kite aerial photography, and photography on a pole. Both units use a similar yoke-mounted camera assembly that is controlled by servos. In fact, if you made the yoke once, you could probably use it for both applications.

Old Dogs/New Tricks Department

Jeff Duntemann gets Ubuntu. His Contrapositive Diary has now been moved over to a WordPress platform. I miss the old single page with the spiral-bound notebook illustration.

I've been working with MindManager for the Mac. This is available in version 8 for Windows, and version 7 for the Mac. Version 7 works fine; while not elaborate, it is quick to learn, and strikes me as an excellent example of "less is more". More ideas for mind mapping are on Chuck Frey's blog and he has a useful e-Book with lots of ideas. One suggestion from the book; when showing a mind map diagram to someone, don't call it a "mind map". My most elaborate map to date was the proposal outline of our NIH grant application discussed a couple posts ago.

Question of the Day: "Why is there no Visio for the Mac?" Or maybe a better way of asking the question, "What is the equivalent of Visio on the Mac?

Non-Technical Question of the Day: Watching the follies surrounding the confirmation of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, I have to ask, what is a guy who underpaid $34,000 in income tax using Turbo-Tax and doing his own taxes in the first place? Oh, and why did this happen to get resolved shortly before his nomination to the post of treasury secretary, even though the years when he didn't pay were back in the first part of the decade? $34,000 is still a respectable salary in my neck of the woods... how much was the guy making in gross salary to be able to owe that much and then not pay it?

MobileMe - Synchronizing Macs

I've been intending to sketch out my whole synchronization scheme which keeps multiple applications synched between two Macs and the rest of the world, but it is so complicated that just documenting it has made me want to rethink. In the interim, I noticed yesterday that a bunch of changes that I had put into my address book on the MacBook didn't get synched to the iMac, and after a lengthy chat with Apple's MobileMe tech support the answer appeared to be nothing more than logging out of MobileMe on the laptop and then logging back in.

One trick with synching with MobileMe is to strip down the applications, so that you are only trying to sync one thing at a time when troubleshooting. Right now I've only got the contacts synching.

If one forgot that you can actually log into your MobileMe account from a web browser, one should be reminded of that helpful suggestion, as you can check whether your sync changes reach the the "cloud". Obviously (in hindsight) if you make a change in iCal on one machine, and do a sync, the changes should appear in the copy of your files in the cloud, before any other machine can sync and download the changes.

Windows vs. Linux - Open Source vs. Commercial

I got sucked in to a bit of back and forth on our local Linux/Unix list a couple days ago and wrote:

Ten years ago I was consulting for a multi-national education non-profit, and I discussed with the systems manager the notion of using open source...in particular I was talking about replacing their Windows 2000/NT servers, with Linux. This would have been a logistical wrench, not least because they had several client/server applications that used SQL-Server as the back end. His point was that as an educational institution, they got such good discounts on any proprietary software that the amount spent on the software was a miniscule percentage of their IT budget. So, there was no economic benefit, and certainly no performance benefit that justified such a change.

Later that year I was doing an inventory of their machines at one of the european sites and couldn't find the terminal server box. Turns out this was a Linux box running VMC or something and it had been bricked up in a wall during a recent renovation, and been merrily running, unseen, for several months.

So, the moral for me was, use what works. At the time I actually got them to go from running four O/S's in the organization to two, Windows, and the aforementioned Linux. We dumped Macs in one site, and Novell in another, and my advice to subsequent clients was to run one and only one OS in the organization.

I'm happy to say that they didn't all run Windows.

Fast File Copying with TeraCopy

Seen in Web Worker Daily... Teracopy, a windows copy program that replaces the Windows Explorer copy function, with both high speed and a synchronization capability.

Newbie Guide to Asterisk Pitfalls

The good folks over at Nerd Vittles continue to hack away at Asterisk, and publish a terrific blog. Their May 12th posting is great. Asterisk Hell: A Minefield Navigation Guide for Newbies.

VoIP Supply offers SIP trunking

I was intrigued to see that VoIP Supply, the folks that sold me my Trixbox and my Polycom SIP phones are now offering SIP trunking and data services.

Don't know how this stacks up against suppliers like VoicePulse. For one thing the pricing model is slightly different, with VoIP Supply looking for a minimum $25.00 per month, but with unlimited local and long-distance calling in the lower 48 states. VoicePulse, at least the version for Asterisk/Trixbox, was on a pre-paid model but charges 2 cents or so per minute.

What about the quality of these calls though? Maybe I'm just cranky, but I've had literally dozens of calls from vendors in the past year that clearly were low-quality VoIP calls. I would be appalled if my own calls to my clients and prospects sounded like many of these calls.

In one case, I was (supposedly) working with a sophisticated and highly-paid consultant who was using either Vonage or the Comcast VoIP. The guy couldn't get out of his own way...I just couldn't understand him, over multiple calls. How are we supposed to conduct business this way? And, where is the savings per month, at $25.00 or $125 or even $1025 per month that the person is supposedly saving, when as a result a client drops this person, after originally looking forward to a multi-thousand dollar contract? False economy.

Bottom Line: The landline isn't dead yet. Use VoiP for long-distance calls to friends and family, and non-critical overseas calls. If there is any question, during a VoIP call, have a back-up landline available.

And if you have contracted out any functions to a call center (perish the thought...my local newspaper has done this to verify authorship of letters to the editor), be sure you get yourself on the receiving end of such calls to assess the quality. Nothing turns off customers and prospects more quickly then struggling with foreign-based tech support, heavily accented, with stupid calling scripts, and bad sound quality.

My Dimming Vista

With all the controversy on Microsoft Vista, here is my contribution to the pile.

Four weeks ago I was going to write a post entitled something like Despite Almost Universal Opprobrium, Windows Vista Works Just Fine for Me or something similar. Sure, I had spent a lot of time futzing with the betas almost two years ago. By the time I installed the first RTM version in November of 2006 with bad results I decided to give up for awhile. But recent first experience of a production copy seemed to belie all of bad press and complaints that I heard from the pundocracy. Examples:

1. Friend buys inexpensive Acer laptop. Comes with Vista Home. Works flawlessly with everything we could throw at it.
2. I installed a copy of Vista Business on my MacBook in a virtual machine provided by Parallels. Works fine, so far. Even with only 512K allotted for the virtual machine.
3. Additional Windows Vista Business licenses installed on our Mini-ITX boxes seemed to work pretty well. There were occasional crashes, but no detectable or replicable pattern.

Then we installed Enterprise on our boxes through a site license and all hell broke loose. What I can't figure out is how much of a difference there is between Enterprise and Business and Home, other than things that are left out. Perhaps it is the footprint? (We're running only in 1 meg of RAM).

So after spending, no kidding, over a hundred hours on this, we've decided to go back to XP. And there everything is solid as a rock again.

We have said it before, and we'll say it again. In a production situation, i.e. your network, use the available time to upgrade everyone to Windows XP service pack 2. Microsoft may not make XP available forever, although it keeps pushing out the end-of-life phase for XP as Vista fails to gain traction.

More specifically, our main problem is a driver crash or incompatibility between our application, and a hardware driver on both Vista Business and Vista Enterprise.

However, I may get shot for saying this, but I prefer the Vista look and feel (even without Aero Glass over the Macintosh OSX's "east-European-behind-the-iron-curtain" look. And Vista is a vast improvement over the XP cartoon look.

NTEN's Staffing and Salary Surveys for IT Staff

NTEN has published its most recent survey on IT for non-profits. A couple excerpts:

� The highest average salary reported was $71,494.57 for a Chief Technology Officer/Chief InformationOfficer.
� The lowest reported average salary was $37,445.65 for a PC Technician/IT Support Staff.
� Reported salaries for most positions were lower this year than last year. The largest drops were for management positions. CIO/CTOs reported salaries 25.44% lower than last year and IT Directors reported salaries 18.42% lower than last year.
� The exceptions to the trend toward lower salaries were Systems/Network Administrator and Webmaster/developer, which were 4.00% and 8.84% higher, respectively.

Create your mission statement as haiku

I've heard of an elevator speech, but how about expressing your mission statement as a haiku?

Dynamic DNS & Port Forwarding

One thing that is necessary when dealing with IP videoconferencing is the whole network management thing. This means dealing with DNS, ports, and firewalls.

DNS remains a bit of a mystery, but in essence, the DNS system maps numerical IP addresses to domain names. So for example, my web site is located at 64.78.42.66. The way I know this is by running the NSLOOKUP command in Windows.

You can find your current public IP address by going to www.whatismyip.com

For help in setting up your router with port forwarding, go to http://portforward.com/

Laura Chappell produces fantastic tutorials on network troubleshooting. I should say "still"...because I've been reading her stuff since Novell was the networking operating system, and that is going back close to twenty years. The linked tutorial, from Novell Connection Magazine is entitled 10 Tasks Every Troubleshooter Should Conquer.

She references the SecTools site for tons of networking tools

Tech Friday: Amazon's Web Services - Database

Every so often somebody makes a prediction which at the time seems plausible, but maybe somewhat out in front of things. They always with start with the word "Someday..." For example:

• Someday, you will be able to go to a machine and withdraw money from your checking account.
  
• Someday, there will be a little box that knows where it is at all times.
  
• Someday we'll all buy our computing power just like we buy electricity.
  

So it was interesting to see an announcement by Amazon yesterday about the Amazon SimpleDB database, a sort of do-it-yourself pennies per hour Oracle database. Well, maybe not Oracle, but a substantial database back end that can be used to host a major application. Actually, the SimpleDB appears to be primarily a querying component; for hosting a large dataset, Amazon offers S3, the Simple Storage Service.

Just a quick browse around shows support for C# and Ruby-on-Rails, among other development languages. In addition, Red Hat is offering Red Hat Enterprise servers as part of the Amazon offering. Their FAQ about "cloud computing" is located here.

This is something to keep an eye on, perhaps the next logical step after virtualization of existing servers in your machine room. Why have any servers at all? Why have a machine room?

Time Tracking with Harvest

I've been using TraxTime from Spud City Software (is that a great name or what?) for yonks to track billable time. TraxTime is a Windows program which runs on a single computer. (There is also a multi-user version which works on a LAN, and allows for aggregate reporting). Now that I've got a Mac, though, I've been looking at web-based time tracking. The problem with Web-based time tracking is that you need to have an open browser running.

But now, Harvest includes widgets for both the mac and the pc which interface with their web-based tracking application. So you can run cross-platform outside of a browser. It has passed the five-minute test.

Windows 2008 Server: Joining my existing domain

Or not. I attempted to join my existing domain with this server being a member server, and received a message:

An attempt to resolve the DNS name of a DC in the domain being joined has failed. Please verify that this client is configured to reach a DNS server that can resolve DNS names in the target domain.

OK...I actually know how to fix this, I think... when configuring IP addresses, I didn't put the local address of my domain controller in as one of the DNS possibilities. Once this change was made...it worked.

So far so good. Now I'm trying to promote the Win 2008 server to a domain controller; it will be interesting to see if this works with Small Business Server as the master domain controller; I recall that one of the restrictions of SBS was that it could be the only DC.

So I can run this remote desktop. I change the permissions to allow logging in under Remote Desktop. Now I can watch this run from my main workstation, with full video support, and avoid the maddening mess on the native monitor screen.

Before actually running the upgrade wizard, there is a utility called adprep which is provided win Win2008. This version is run on the master DC (ie the SBS 2003) to upgrade the AD database to match the level of the Win2008 database. A message suggests that this upgrade takes the existing AD level 30 to AD level 40.
So, I copy the entire adprep folder from the Win2008 machine to the SBS2003 machine, then on SBS2003, I run the following commands:

adprep /forestprep

adprep /domainprep

Then in response to a message from the result of the domain prep, I run the following to update permissions on the group objects:
adprep /domainprep /gpprep

There is a nice help screen which explains this process.

Now, in on the new machine, running the AD Domain Services Installation Wizard, I will "Add a domain controller to an existing domain."

Now I get an error: "You will not be able to install a read-only DC in this domain because adprep /rodcprep was not yet run. Do you want to continue?" Since I don't want a RO DC here, that is fine, and I just continue.

It asks to select a site:
Defualt-First-Site-Name

It now asks if I want to install additional services; a DNS server, and a Global catalog. This dialog includes some additional stuff about a Read-Only domain controller, that is irrelevant because I don't want to install a Read Only domain controller.

So, while I would prefer not to install the DNS server and Global catalog, since eventually I want to promote the Win2008 machine to the master domain controller, I'll allow these two items to be installed. I hit the "next" button.

Now an error message comes up:

A delegation for this DNS Server will not be created because the authoritative parent zone cannot be found or it does not support dynamic updates. To ensure this DNS Server can be resolved as authoritative for the domain mxdesign.local, you can create a delegation to this DNS Server manually in the parent zone. Do you want to continue?

Well, OK...let's continue.

Now it asks for locations for the database, log files and SYSVOL, suggesting that these should be on separate volumes. Ain't gonna happen. Next.

The Directory Services Restore Mode Administrator account is different from the domain Administrator account. Assign a password for the Administrator account that will be used when this domain controller is started in Directory Services Restore Mode.

I give it my normal admin password. There is this talk about the password being the correct complexity and length, and conforming to the correct history.

So far so good, the DNS install goes ahead and completes in about two minutes. This requires a reboot, so I'm psyched to see how this will work when it comes back up.

Windows Server 2008

I've installed a beta of Windows Server 2008 on a new partition that I carved out on my secondary workstation. Installation went fairly smoothly, but both my sound card and the onboard Intel graphics chipset are not supported, so I'm stuck with the generic VGA driver which, frankly, looks like hell. Still, since most server management will take place remotely, this shouldn't be a show stopper.

The install creates a dual-boot menu at startup, which allows me to choose betweein Win 2008 or a "legacy windows system"...that is, my existing Windows XP workstation.

The beta is good until April 2008. After about 20 minutes, everything is copied to the hard drive, and you can start playing.

A major advantage of 2008 is that the wizards previously available on small business server have been added to 2008 to provide "accidental network managers" some additional support.

I quickly changed the default IP address obtained from the DHCP server on my router to a fixed IP4 address. I also nailed down the admin password.

Right out of the box the server doesn't do a thing; you have to assign "roles" from the extensive list provided:

• Active Directory (several items)
  
• Application Server
  
• DHCP server
  
• DNS server (and is this required for AD as in previous versions?)
  
• Fax server (the application that apparently will never die)
  
• File Services (our first role)
  
• Network Policy and Access services (functionality provided by the previous add-on application, including VPN services and fewalling)
  
• Print Services (shared printers)
  
• Terminal Services
  
• IIS
  
• SharePoint
  
• Windows Deployement Services

Picking one of the roles above then allows you to pick additional functionality related to the main role.

Roles that require other roles as a prerequisite will automatically let you know.For example you can't install Sharepoint without installing IIS and the Net Framework 3.0. Makes sense, of course.

For starters, I've installed print services and file services. Once the installation is complete, I received a message saying I had to restart the server.

Chron this week: Google Apps

Technology-related articles in this week's Chronicle of Philanthropy

Google Offers Charities Free Software, Help

This article describes Google Apps, which are the Google Mail, Google Docs (word processing) and Google Spreadsheets.

Google Apps, which will be free t nonprofit organizations in the United States, includes e-mail and calendar programs, Internet-based telephone and text-messaging services, and word-processing, spreadsheet, and Web-publishing applications.

More at www.google.com/a/npo.

FCC Offers Educational Radio Licenses

For the first time in even years, the Federal Communications Commisssion in mid-October will accept applicaitons for new, full-power stations used for non-commercial, educational purposes.

More at http://radioforpeople.org

Salesforce for nonprofits - Database Alternative

Salesforce is one of the most popular web-enabled databases, and it's gaining adherants among nonprofits. Accessible from any browser, customizable in myriad ways -- and available to nonprofits for no fee through the Salesforce.com Foundation (up to 10 seats) -- it's a powerful tool. But how can a database with a name like Salesforce be used by the nonprofit sector? This webinar will explore the functionality and community of Salesforce. We'll look at how several nonprofits, from a group of more than 1500, use Salesforce to cultivate and recruit donors, manage their electronic communications, and more. If you are looking for a new CRM solution, or just want to know more about Salesforce, this webinar will be a great starting point.
Presented by Rob Jordan, Idealist Consulting

Register now at http://nten.org/webinars.

Microsoft Action Pack: Vista and Office 2007

Sooooo....the Microsoft Action Pack Q1 shipment arrives with Office 2007 Enterprise and Vista Business Edition upgrade. I spend 90 minutes digging bits of the Office 2007 beta 2 Technical Refresh out of my workstation before it allows me to install Office 2007.

Conversley, the Vista install has to be done over an existing XP install. WTF? That means if you want a clean install, you first have to install XP, then install Vista on top. This has to be a mistake, I'm sure that Bill's boys and girls will be fixing this momentarily, right?

So I skipped Vista for now, and went with the Office 2007 Enterprise. This not only includes the usual suspects but a few others, like Groove, Expressions Web (The replacement for the unlamented FrontPage), Visio 2007, and a bunch of SharePoint stuff.

By my count there are at now at least three different technologies for "shared workspaces" offered by Microsoft; Groove, Sharepoint, and within some versions of Vista. Actually, four, because you can share OneNote notebooks in real time as well.

Before investing too much in the Microsoft versions, check out the Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet. I had a two-hour shared telephone conference with budget spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheet this morning, which worked out fine. It is a little funky when downloaded back into Excel, but it worked. And of course, we still like Backpack, I mean Basecamp.

Access 2007 Runtime

Well, I wish I was pointing to the Access 2007 runtime, but I'm not, however, this Microsoft page, discusses several points of interest:

1. The runtime will be available "shortly after the release to the general public of Microsoft Office Access 2007
   
2. The runtime and developer extensions will be free downloads.
   
3. The Extensions will include a packaging wizard, similar to the one for 2003, which optionally includes the runtime files, and any other files, necessary to create an MSI
   
4. The Developer Extensions will include hooks for Source Code Control
   
5. The Extensions will not include the Property Scanner or Customer Startup Wizard that were previously available in earlier versions.
   
6. Links to the download locations will be posted on Office Online and the Access Developer Portal on MSDN.
   

Chron This Week:

This week the Chronicle of Philanthropy includes their 2007 Technology Guide, which is a special advertising section for technology consultants, and fundraising software companies. An article by Scott Westcott attempts to make the connection between social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace with online charity fundraising, and attracting volunteers.

VolunteerMatch has attracted more than 1000 people who link to its online profile since joining Myspace in July.
[A]s of this month, MySpace listed 15,587 non-profit organizations. The largest is People Helping People, a group of people who want to work together in promoting the common good, which has 17,000 “friends” on MySpace.

There are additional articles on virtual communities, video games, and using cellphone text messaging for fundraising.
Another article discusses the relationship between charities and the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress.

Charities and foundations, which have devoted much energy in recent years to defending their organizations from charges of wrongdoing, and to trying to persuade Congress not to impose onerous new regulations, are hoping for a friendlier climate now that Demoocrats are in charge on Capital Hill.  

Blog discoveries

I think I was a little quick with the delete button the other day, when I deleted an entry pointing to "Confessions of a non-profit IT Director".

Mea Culpa.

If I remember correctly, this was accompanied by a comment to the effect that this was a blog by a person who is actually doing something. Too many of us are pontificating...I like to read about people who are actually trying to get something working.

Today I Cried was the other blog I had mentioned.

BaseCamp: Web-Based Workflow

I was working with a trade association that has been struggling for a couple of years to transform itself from a volunteer association to having paid staff. I attended a meeting on Wednesday, and we were told that there was three-week deadline to complete a business plan and pro forma budget to submit to our state economic development authority. After lengthy discussion we agreed amoung the ten people in the meeting that we needed to produce essentially two documents which would be combined for the proposal. We assigned champions for both documents, and then one of our members said:

Well, we're really all software developers in this room; we should be eating our own dog food here and using some kind of web-based project manager or workflow manager, instead of attempting to send copies of eMails around with huge attachments.

Fair enough. I waited for the other shoe to drop. The suspense was tangible:
Would the Microsoft SharePoint guy offer to host a site? Would the open source guru offer to put up a LAMP site with one of the open source workflow applications? Should I offer my usual FTP site+web bulletin board/Google Groups thing that I've used for clients for yonks?

Tense moments passed. We mulled features, development effort and cost. Finally a third guy said, "I'll put up a BaseCamp project. It should take about thirty minutes." And indeed, a couple hours laster we had our ten-user web site with:

• Dashboard (home page)
  
• Task List
  
• File upload and download (with version control)
  
• Writeboard (online word-processor with version control)
  
• Messageboard
  
• Calendar
  
• User login with security settings
  
• User and site administratration
  

You can have all changes pushed to eMail...but that means that you end up reading everything twice. You can have all changes appear in the RSS feed. That is a great way to be alerted of changes without having to fish through them in eMail. The free Basecamp service offers everything except the File upload and download function...I sprang for the $12.00/month to allow this feature and that also allows the hosting of 15 projects per site. If this works out for our current project, we'll probably find other uses pretty quickly.

This is what Web 2.0 is all about. Lightweight, Hosted, Quick, Easy. No IT Guru Required.