YWAM Information Technology

Lately we have witnessed Google Premium Aps going down for over half a day, Gmail having some troubles and various other hosted third party solutions

At Reef to Outback we made the decision to build our base web-site on Ning, a hosted social network solution. Ning has a lot of good features, but it is also lacking a lot. To help with the lack of some features there are a lot of third party developers working on widgets for Ning.

This week the most popular Premium Widget Developer, WidgetLaboratory, was shut down due to supposed "TOS violations". We had used a lot of their widgets to build significant functionality into the site, and now we have lost that functionality until we can build our own widgets, or find someone else who can.

This highlights one of the risks that we are taken when choosing a hosted third party solution.

I received an e-mail today asking what is the best way to send bulk, merged e-mail to a large number, 7000, people. I have a few ideas, but I wanted to get the input of others of the YWAM IT community...

Here is the e-mail I received:

Hi,

I have written during the last 2 years to lots of Ywam communication staff, but never got an answer how I could sent my newsletters. I am not a specialist in IT , and on our base in Brazil with just a little less then 100 staff we don't have anybody who is.

My problem is that through the 28 years in YWAM we now have up 7000 people who want to receive our newsletters, 2000 in Dutch, 2000 in English and 3000 in Portguese, and a growing number of primary schools. We sent our newsletter once every 2 months and it sometimes takes me 3 days at my computer just to sent 2000, snailmail is faster!!!! I have tried mailmerge from word in Office 2008, tried to send groups of 50 addresses, tried to use a program that I bought, called Sendblaster, but nothing really worked!

There must be lots more of IT dummies like me, who don't know good programs to sent their newsletters. Please, do you have advise?

Thanks a lot!

Jeannette

First off I need to say that Jeannette, you are not a dummy!

As the Senior Technology Specialist for FedEx Office in Rochester, NY, I have the responsibility of donating computer equipment to 501(c)3 registered NPOs. 

As we look towards the future of YWAM IT I thought that it would be important to put together a bit of a roadmap for how we want to continue to develop the site.

You can check out the roadmap here, or through the link in the top navigation.

Any feedback that you have for it would be best added to the forum, What would you like to see on this site.

­From previous reading I have done on this site, I've noticed that there are a number of members who use Microsoft SharePoint. While I prefer to stay away from proprietary software, I cannot blame them. After all, it does have some rather cool features.

It's time for a new desktop. One should think that a 2.5GHz w/ 1GB RAM is fast enough. Specially with Linux. But if I'm honest it was never really 100% satisfying responsive as soon as some apps are running at the same time. Might be because it's a Celeron processor with little cache. But what ever the reasons are, the limits of that system are easily reached.

What is the best way for a YWAM base to provide Staff and Volunteer Applications that can be filled out, submitted, and reviewed online?

What do you guys think of this? Not just from a technology standpoint but from a philosophical one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHsYnkLnepk