START --  CONNECTIVITY  --  SYSTEM & APPS  --  DATA

Now to look at the systems in place.

A. Hardware

1. Current system

a. CPU: Intel P3 655Mhz. This is ok, about 3 years old, but is loosing ground fast

b. RAM: either 128Mb or 256Mb

c. Disk: can't remember, but plenty for the Center

d. UPS battery backup.

2. Upgrade

a. I strongly recommend acquiring a business class machine, not a consumer level machine. You get what you pay for. The components in a business level machine are better. I bought a cheapy machine a couple of years ago, and the disk controller went flakey and corrupted 3 different hard drives before I realized the source of the problem.

b. Figure somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,200 which includes the cost of a Windows operating system.

c. An interim solution is to max out the RAM in the current system.

3. Review the current battery backup and consider replacing. New models include software that will shut down the computer gracefully as the battery dies. Particularly important if the computer is left on all the time.

B. Access permissions

1. Currently the system is set up with two accounts

a. Administrator: full access and control.

b. Power User: limited access and control. This prevents the user from indavertenly doing something wrong to the operating system. However, it prevents the user from installing programs and has lead to the problems with the dial-up modem.

2. This needs further discussion, particularly in light of people other than core staff using the system.

C. Software

1. Operating system: Windows 2000 Pro, latest service pack.

2. Office 2000. Components used:

a. Word, Excel, Access, Publisher, Powerpoint

b. Upgrade issues: The current Office upgrade available offers no real additional features. The coming upgrade (or maybe it's out now) continues the two MS trends

bloat – more features and stuff that the Center doesn't need and won't use

enterprise – MS caters to it's large customers (of course). The issue is that the needs of a multi-location corporation are much different than the needs of a small office. MS is including features that purport to assist large customers to integrate applications, facilitate remote workgroups, and increase data confidentiality. The problem is that these features can add support headaches for the small user.

c. Alternatives:

Discussion of alternatives to MS Office entail political and futurism issues along with the technical considerations.

The political issues all surround the nature of Microsoft and it's business practices. In a nutshell, Microsoft products are proprietary and closed. The stated Microsoft agenda is to control the entire computing infrastructure of the world through the ubiquitous use of their software.

The futurism issues are tied to the political issues. The forces arrayed against Microsoft are the open software community. These people create software, both operating systems and applications, that have an open license and in many cases are free. Rather than imposing proprietary standards, they work to implement the open standard specifications. The most notable player in this camp is IBM, which makes money from providing consulting and management services rather than from selling software.

The situation will come to a head somewhere in 2006 or 2007, when Microsoft launches it's new armada, code named Longhorn. In the intervening years, companies will be switching their back office servers from Microsoft to open source systems because right now these systems provide greater capabilities at lower cost. However, the open software people have not made great strides in supplanting the desktop operating system (i.e. Windows 2000 or Windows XP) and, with the exception of Lindows, there isn't a great deal of movement in this area. So the question becomes: will Longhorn succeed in leveraging the installed base of Windows desktops and sweep aside the open software throughout the enterprise? An additional factor in this battle is that Microsoft has increased its patent activity. The company recently filed a patent application to cover the particular way its new Office applications parse XML coding. While the XML specification is an open protocol, if Microsoft is successful in obtaining its patent, it will mean that no other application can read a Microsoft document with obtaining a license from Microsoft to do so.

The technical considerations are straightforward in comparison. There are a number of alternatives that run on Windows. The leading contender is Open Office, a free, open software suite. It has a good word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. It's pretty good at translating MS documents, and saves documents in a format that translates back to MS applications pretty well. It has a very active community of support, including corporate sponsorship by Sun Microsystems. Their roadmap calls for a thorough overall to be delivered the end of 2004 with increased speed and translation of MS formats.

Since the Center doesn't do a lot of document sharing with others, I highly recommend considering switching to Open Office. I use it at home exclusively and at work for word processing and my own spreadsheets.

Much of the data collection work at the Center is done using Access 2000. The alternative here is to use the mySQL database, another free open software package. This will require reworking of systems. Access 2000 is a very good and inclusive database package which integrates forms creation and report creation. mySQL requires a more technical approach with forms and reports being generated as web pages or the inclusion of another report generating software. The key point here is that the installation of Open Office does not preclude the continued use of Access 2000 (see more on Data, below).

3. Web development

a. Currently the web sites are developed in an ad hoc manner using a variety of tools.

b. This area needs further discussion. The core topics are:

What is the roadmap for the two web sites.

How to implement a modicum of central control, both in terms of direction and technology, while allowing for a wide range of contributors and contributions to the sites.

START -- CONNECTIVITY  --  SYSTEM & APPS  --  DATA