Please join Steve Backman and the Database Designs team at the Mass Nonprofit Network/Associated Grant Makers 2011 Conference. The conference takes place this fall on October 20, 2011.
In keeping with this year's exciting theme, "Leading the Way," Steve will be co-presenting a workshop on "Data Driven Technology Leadership" with Debra Askanase and Marc Baizman. And look for the Database Designs booth at the conference.
Shelley Podolny’s March 12 New York Times column, “The Digital Pileup,” started me thinking. “Because electronic information seems invisible, we underestimate the resources it takes to keep it all alive.” Podolny reports global data usage of 1.2 zettabytes (a lot of gigabytes). For the US alone, 3% of the national power supply supports “server farms,” the giant data centers with aisles and aisles of servers.
Salesforce helped pioneer the concept of putting confidential organizational data in a "public cloud" system. Other key vendors offering public cloud data services include Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 services. "Cloud" has come to mean many things to many people as far as putting internal office functions up on the Internet. The word “public” is important to understand. This means that all data--every corporate and nonprofit user--sits in one enormous database. This is in fact a reassurance, not a drawback.
Something different about this blog entry then my usual ones is that I'm dictating it instead of typing it. Every so often my mouse hand and wrist bothers me for a week or two. The last time this happened, I decided to get a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking software and try it out. Coincidentally, a couple weeks ago, in the middle of all this miserable snow we’re having in the Northeast, a friend and colleague tore a tendon in in his elbow. I convinced him to try out the software. He needs to write all the time, and he has been using it almost exclusively and successfully.
Jon Larosa and I are just back from Dreamforce, the big annual Salesforce conference, with 30,000 people mobbing the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Many were there for the first time, evaluating or just getting used to working with Salesforce and its cloud computing model.
One of Database Designs' strengths is that we support three development platforms: .Net, drupal and SalesForce. This means that we can bring our knowledge of all three environments to select the one that best meets our clients' needs. I am the head of our .Net practice and as such, I was given the job of shepherding Database Designs through the Microsoft Certified Partner process.
I love Apple products, but I don't like the policies behind the App Store or iTunes. That said, Steve Jobs got it right when he banned Adobe's Flash from Apple's mobile platform.
Flash is the technology for peristing information about you and your surfing habits outside of your browser. In other words it a perfect end run around privacy settings. It didn't start out that way on purpose either.
Email is in the news these days, at least here in Boston and Massachusetts. Twitter, Facebook, and political blogs have elbowed their way in as organizing tools, yet incidents in the lowly world of email have had a huge public impact.
If you don’t live in Massachusetts, our local politics may not interest you and who can blame you. Bear with me a minute.
When we first started bearing down on Drupal two years ago, about the first thing we wanted to do manage independent projects on our own www.dbdes.com site. We got reasonably far, with the ability to define clients, projects, tasks and organize blog-like discussion and documents for each.
