The team at Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business has a great blog posting on how to use the Contact page on your website. You should read it, and see how you measure up! Here are the salient points:

• Always list a physical mailing address
• List all appropriate phone numbers
• List at least one email address that is checked regularly
• Include a photo or map of your business
• If you have a blog, include a link to it
• List the events you attend or promote

One of the reasons we love using Plone for our website services is that we can give our customers access to editing their own contact page - that’s one step closer to using your website effectively!

A colleague at One NW spotted this article and posted a link - many thanks to Jon for pointing this out!

It’s a pretty quick read - 23 Lessons from Eye Tracking Studies. Many key takeaways here, the most notable being that content still wins - better than graphics, better than ads, better than things that flash.  Other key takeaway - is that navigation along the top appears to draw better attention than along the side.

You should read the article, pass it along to your team, and make sure that your web design professional sees it, too!

I like to check out CNET.com on a regular basis. They do some cool technology reviews even though they are business - consumer focused. Today they had a cute, simple & short review of 3 free image editing alternatives to Photoshop.

Now I love Photoshop and think it’s a great program but it can be overkill when you want to just make a small, simple modification. And it can be expensive if you have to by it retail. Although the consumer version, Photoshop Elements is a better deal (at around $100) and simpler to use.

 The 3 programs CNET reviewed were:

• Paint NET
• FotoFlexer
• GIMP

I myself haven’t used any of these but I was impressed with paint.net & GIMP because they’re open source programs. The review wasn’t really in-depth, mostly superficial. I would definitely recommend checking them out, since they are free. And the download section of CNET has user ratings. All 3 had pretty high ratings.

And TechSoup always has good advice on software in their learning center or from other nonprofit users in the discussion forums.

You can check out the video review at http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-31682.html?tag=cnetfd.vid

I love the look of surprise on students faces when I talk about using mail merge in the Microsoft Office suite. Generally when we think of using mail merge we think letters - labels, envelopes and those aweful form letters. Our view is a little narrow. That’s where the surprise comes in. Mail merge is a lot more flexible than that. We can use it to, of all things, send email to a list of people. In other words, our mail merge isn’t a print letter; instead it’s an email letter. The advantage is that instead of sending 1 email to 50 people, you’re sending individual emails to 50 people - one at a time. And just like a traditional mail merge letter, you can customize it so that each email is addresses to the individual.

Most of us don’t think of creating a email merge and that’s in part because you don’t do it in Outlook. The Mail Merge engine is part of Word, so you need to be in Word in order to start the process. But you can grab the contacts in Outlook, use all of Outlooks features & options for email, etc. If you’re not sure how, check out NPower’s Mail Merge Demystified class. We cover creating an email merge using the Mail Merge wizard.

Now I am not recommending that you all go out and start sending merge emails to hundreds of people at a time. In fact I highly recommend that you don’t! There are some disadvantages:

1. Your Internet Service Provider (i.e. your email account) could see all of those emails coming out of your account at once and assume you’ve been hijacked with a virus and shut down your account!
2. If you’re sending out to that many people at a time, you really should look into a distribution service such as Vertical Response. Services give you a lot more options, such as templates, tracking tools (you can see who actually opens your email or clicks on a link in it).
3. If your email is a newsletter or similar correspondence that comes out on a scheduled basis; you are legally required to unsubscribe people if they request it. Again a service can automate this for you.

So you may be thinking, well why mention it then? Because it can work really well for us when we don’t need to go through all the steps needed with a service. It’s a one time deal, you want to use contacts from your database (yes the merge can pull records from your access database), or it’s to people you don’t want to add to your service or database.

How many of us have PDF documents that we use on a regular basis? Perhaps it was something created by another staff person at your organization? And what happens if the original document goes missing? No one want to re-create something from scratch when they already have a perfect copy, just because it’s in the PDF format. But have you ever tried opening a PDF in Microsoft Word? I did just for fun, you get a bunch of numbers, letter and other odd characters.

But all is not lost. If you happen to have a full versionof Adobe Acrobat, you can convert your PDF into something Word can work with. So what is a full version? It’s easier to tell you what it isn’t, and that’s the free downloadable Acrobat Reader. This is what most people have and Adobe puts it out their for pretty much 1 thing, so you can read and sometimes print your PDF files.

Adobe also sells 3 other version of Acrobat:

• Acrobat Elements (Windows only, version 7 only, and by volume licence only)
• Acrobat Standard
• Acrobat Professional

And they are a bit pricey, if you pay retail. Lucky for the nonprofit community Adobe joined TechSoup, so you can get a discounted version there if your nonprofit qualifies.

Now for the trick, if you open a PDF in a full version of Acrobat you and turn around and save it into a format Word can use. The trick is changing the file type. By default when you use Save As in Acrobat it want to save it as a PDF. At the bottom of your Save As window change the Save As Type dropdown from Adobe PDF to either Microsoft Word Document (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rtf).

Social Networking was the buzz in 2007 - and I bet we’ll see more of it in 2008, too. I’m not yet convinced that FaceBook or MySpace can or should supplant your existing methods for reaching your stake-holders. I’d love to be wrong - but I’m not bullish that the hype will meet many expectations.

The good folks at Idealware have a terrific new article out that addresses both some of my concerns AND offers some great tips for those that are ready to try those tools.

It’s well worth a read!

It’s a tough world out there - just when we were all getting used to Virus and Spam problems  - we had to start figuring out how to protect against Spyware. Then along came “Phishing” (when you get email that looks and feels like someone else and they trick you into giving up important information).

There’s another one - it’s called a Root Kit Attack. The folks at the City of Seattle have a great article about it. The good news is that all of the things you’ve learned about spam and spyware and phishing apply - make sure you have great anti-virus, a firewall, you’re up to date on security patches and so on.

If you’re managing all of your own technical infrastructure - you’ll want to read that article and double check your protections. And if you have a vendor - you should ask them to make sure you have the proper tools in place to keep your computers and network safe!

I wanted to repost this information from Salesforce regarding a new "phishing" attempt - as always - beware of email asking for user names, passwords, credit card information, that contain files to download that you aren’t expecting and so on!

Dear Salesforce.com Customer,

Please be advised that there is a new malicious phishing email being circulated that is attempting to mimic the Salesforce Identity Confirmation feature.

What does this phishing email look like?

This goal of this malware is to attempt to collect user passwords to online systems, including banks, credit agencies, and salesforce.com.  It does this using an email attachment that contains malicious software intended to compromise your PC.  Known attachments have been variously named either form.zip or UpdateIElink.zip, but other names may exist.  Here is a sample of the email text:

New Security Feature: Identity Confirmation

To further protect our customers from security threats stemming from phishing attempts, salesforce.com will be implementing "Identity Confirmation." This set of security features is triggered when users attempt to login to Salesforce from a different computer and from an unrecognized location for the first time. Please download and install the security update attached to this email.

What action must I take?
Do not open the attachment.  Delete the email and attachment immediately.
If a user has installed this attachment on his system:

• The system should be disconnected from the network immediately. (It may take up to 72 hours for the major anti-virus utility vendors to update their signatures to block this malware.)
• Compromised users should change passwords for all computing systems to which they have access, including Salesforce, banking, credit, email, and company systems.

How can I tell the difference between this phishing attempt and salesforce.com’s Identify Confirmation Feature?

• The salesforce.com Identity Confirmation feature will always send a link that leads to a secure salesforce.com domain.  For example:
  https://na5.salesforce.com/_nc_external/system/security/ChallengeValidate…
• The salesforce.com Identity Confirmation feature will not ever include an attachment or direct you to download and install software.  Any emails of this nature should be considered malicious.

How can I get more information?
Please visit trust.salesforce.com for additional information regarding this phishing attempt and to get more information regarding online security best practices. 

In addition, your Customer Success Manager or Customer Support Representative work in conjunction with our Technology & Products team and are all equipped to answer questions you may have.

Regards,
Salesforce.com Customer Support

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All rights reserved :: Various trademarks held by their respective owners
salesforce.com | One Market Street, Suite 300, San Francisco | CA 94105

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I’ve had my eye on all of the "web 2.0" hope and hype - and just found a terrific quote from David Brin, courtesy of Jon Stahl. (Jon works at ONE NW, an agency that also implements Plone and Salesforce for nonprofit’s - and the ONE NW team and the NPower team collaborate whenever possible!)

Here’s the context: Edge is a website devoted to promoting inquiry and discussion - it’s new to me - but I like what I see so far. In any case, they invited some smart people to answer the question "What Have You Changed You Mind About?" - and David’s answer has a great quote:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

Indeed, most adults won’t have anything to do with all the wondrous gloss that fills the synchronous online world, preferring by far the older, asynchronous modes, like web sites, email, downloads etc.

This isn’t grouchy old-fart testiness toward the new. In fact, there are dozens of discourse-elevating tools just waiting out there to be born. Everybody is still banging rocks together, while bragging about the colors. Meanwhile, half of the tricks that human beings normally use, in real world conversation, have never even been tried online.

I heartily agree. Facebook, Spaces, MySpace, Wiki’s, Second Life - all promise a lot - but I’m not sure that they deliver. We’ll see what 2008 brings - I would love to be asked that same question next year and say "social networking and web 2.0 sites, tools and practices DID help nonprofit’s connect and deliver on their mission!"

If you’ve been looking for a good content management system, you’ve likely encountered what I refer to as the “CMS Wars”: Three of the tools available generate a lot of debate, a lot of interest, and a lot of fierce loyalty.

(If you’re wondering, the tools are Plone, Joomla and Drupal).

They should - each tool is terrific and getting better quickly. The good folks at Idealware continue to publish and host webinars about these tools. And one of my Plone experts just sent along a lengthy and very thoughtful article from someone who has implemented both tools - which makes for a great perspective!

We implement Plone here at NPower Seattle, and have been happy with the sites we’ve been able to create, the speed at which many of our customers learn how to use Plone to update content, and with the broader Plone community, too.

All of that said, though - as the tools get better and better (think about your copy machine!) - I think that you should due your homework about feature set and functionality AND give equal consideration to your local vendor or service provider. Often, the service and breadth of experience of your provider will make a bigger difference than the tool you select!