Week 2
Getting answers to technical questions

In many small to medium non-profits, technology support is hard to come by.  This session will be devoted to strategies for finding answers to technical questions.  Among the topics to be explored are online sources of answers, knowing how to trust an answer and choosing a technical consultant.  Each participant will receive a question to be answered and will report back to the class using the wiki on how the answer was discovered and why the answers can be trusted.

Start by posting the question you will be answering into the wiki in a new page and making sure to mark it with your name. As the week goes by, add to your answer.

Meanwhile, use the listserv or the wiki to comment on other student's submissions. s

  1. We are a small non-profit with 5 employees, but we are starting to get a base of volunteers and some donors. What database program should we use to track all of this?
  2. Boy, are we ever in luck! A nearby business has offered to donate 10 used computers. Should we accept these? If so, what should we be aware of?
  3. Uh-oh, my boss just found out that most of the other agencies around have websites. How should we go about getting the website started for our agency? Do we have the needed skills and technology? What can we do in-house?
  4. We all just got new copies of PowerPoint and we are going to create presentations for training and public forums. Now we'll need a laptop and projector. Which systems should we buy?
  5. Our agency has no in-house technical support. We need to have e-mail accounts. How can we go about setting them up?
  6. Our staff and most of our volunteers are pretty familiar with Microsoft Office. However, we've recently learned about a product called OpenOffice that is free and is said to handle all of the MS Office files. Buying Office is costly for us. Should we start using OpenOffice from now on?
  7. We know we need virus protection on all of our machines, but buying the license is expensive. Are there free alternatives? Are they any good? What about protecting from spyware and adware? How should we handle this?

Resources

These are some of the places I start a search. Make sure to add some that you find and let us know why they are reliable.



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