Panopea Consulting - iMIS Blog

Quote of the Day

My favorite quote from Day #1 of the ASAE Tech Conference... 

How to make changes within your organization: 

Gentle pressure relentlessly applied.

Blogging from the ASAE Tech Conf.

I'm here in DC to attend ASAE's Association Technology Conference.

I enjoyed Anthony Williams in the General Session that opened the conference. Williams is the co-author of Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. In his presentation, Williams highlighted 4 types of collaboration that are especially relevant to associations:

1. Peering - This is exemplified by the creation of Linux, the program that made open source for real. Linus Torvald created the idea and put it out to the world and eventually IBM embraced it. Per Williams' presentation, IBM has annual revenue of $1 billion from its Linux-based products and has saved an additional $900 million in development costs because of sharing and collaborating in the development of Linux.
2. Ideagoras - These are defined as "places where millions of ideas and solutions change hands in something akin to an eBay for innovation." The example Williams used is Proctor & Gamble. P&G realized that they couldn't keep up with the increasingly rapid pace of innovation. They have 9,000 scientists (!) doing R&D and that's still not enough. So they use Innocentive to find more R&D scientists outside of P&G to solve problems they haven't found the answer to or to get fresh ideas.
3. Prosumers - Prosumers are users who want to design their own product with the vendor company. The example here is remixing of music via the web. Specifically, the band Nine Inch Nails have released their music free on the web so that their fans can re-mix their music, creating something new.
4. Wiki Organizations - Wikipedia is the prime example we are all familiar with. Another example is Sermo, a knowledge-sharing site for medical experts. It allows doctors to share information without having to wait for journals or to attend conference.

I think these ideas are hugely important for associations to be embracing and adopting internally and with their membership. The demographics of the up and coming Gen Y people make it essential that associations provide these collaboration methods. If they do not, their Gen Y members will either leave or not join at all and will create their own communities.

Norton Internet Security breaks MS Access

Here's what it looks like:
You have an Access file and need to link or re-link your iMIS tables into the .mdb file. You're on the Tables pane, click New, select Link Tables. In the Link dialog window, you select Files of Type and scroll to the bottom to select ODBC Databases like you've done a million times. Only now nothing happens. Hey!? 

I ran into this problem before and forgot about it. I switched back to using Norton Internet Security (the 2008 version) in the past couple of weeks and ran into the Norton breaks Access problem again. That deja vu feeling all over again.

Here's the path to turn off the option that is causing the problem specifically for the Norton 2008 version:

1. Select Options on the bottom left side of the main Norton window to open the Internet Security Options window.
2. Under Real-Time Protection: General Settings, there's an option to "Turn on Scanning for Microsoft Office documents (requires Microsoft Office 2000 or later)"
3. Make sure that option is unchecked.

Click here to see a Microsoft KB article if you want more information, though they've not updated it for the Norton 2008 product.

If you look at the KB article, you'll see that this problem goes back to Norton 2000. Now 8 years later, it's still an issue. Wouldn't you think by now that Symantec would have figured out a way not to cause this problem? Or to make their Office plug-in  options a little more granular, so I could have Norton checking my Word & Excel files even if I've turned off the checking of my Access files or something like that? Sheesh.

File Recovery Utilities Do Work!

Ok, I won't go into the ugly details but suffice it to say I recently lost a file I really, really wanted back. I realized it following the re-install of WinXP on the same drive. Um..big oops!

I tried two products unsuccessfully and felt increasingly ill that my missing file was not being found. On what I had already determined was going to be my third and final attempt, I used the product Active @ UNDELETE. It was great! It found far more files than its competitors and, most importantly, it found the file I really, really wanted back. And, thus, I highly recommend it. ;-)

The only thing I didn't like about it was that the demo version couldn't be converted to a full-working version with the purchase of the license key. I had to re-install the paid version. The reason that's a big deal is that it means you have to do the search of the hard drive all over again to allow the paid version to able to do the recovery process. The demo version is limited to files that are 64 KB or smaller. I was a bit worried that my essential file was going to be written over during the install of the paid version, but the computer gods were kind to me that day and gave me back my file. And re-doing the search process is slow.

May you never need this advice!