The Spotlight : Stuff I Like

Tips from a Troubleshooter: Stealing the Spotlight

Sean Long — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:51:00 GMT

Hey,

My name is Sean, I work in Patron Edge Support and with Nicholai on Patron Edge and Patron Edge Online. I've contributed to blogs for Education Edge and Student Billing in the past, and now I get to stretch my legs and really explore the Arts and Cultural marketplace.

I've gotta say that I really like the people I've talked to already, and the market is very interesting and full of innovation and creativity. Personally, I've always been a bit of a nerd and I've been learning as much as I can about the networked environments that clients use to make Patron Edge, Patron Edge Online, and Patron Edge Kiosk work.

Over the next few posts, I hope to share some insights into the meat of how all of these databases talk to each other, and share some tips and utilities I've found useful for troubleshooting our software. As always, if there is specifics you'd want to know more about just leave a comment!

Have any tools (open source, other blogs, or otherwise) you use daily in an IT environment? Let me know!

Two Cool Tools for the Back Office

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:21:00 GMT

I'm about six months into my own nonprofit arts organization (parkcirclefilms.org) and am always looking for ways to work smarter and automate repetitive tasks. I wanted to share two excellent tools I've implemented to manage the administrative stuff so I can focus on our mission.

TWiki

TWiki is a really cool, open source wiki and collaboration system. It can be a bear to install, but the wiki engine is powerful and it sports awesome features like:

Project management and project development - Your IT staff can use it for coordinating on website or report development, and the marketing folks can use it to collaborate on your next big campaign.

Knowledge management - As my organization grows, more volunteers have started getting involved. To keep the learning curve low, volunteers are given a login to TWiki that gives them access to our Policies and Procedures web and other pertinent information. Things they shouldn't be allowed to read are kept private via group security.

Document management - This was what caught my eye first. We have meeting minutes, image files and other documents that I need to share easily and securely. Google Docs was my first attempt, but it lacks version control and you can only do text documents and spreadsheets. TWiki is good for keeping track of documents, and keeping them organized in a way that makes sense (because the file name "mrkt_sum_09_letter_stats.xls" won't make any sense in two months).

If it's good enough for Yahoo!, Cingular and SAP, I figured it was worth a shot, and I'm not disappointed at all. This is a great product that will scale into a nice intranet as we continue to grow.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the best blogging platform currently available. It's free and open source, and has hundreds of great plugins to extend it. We didn't need a full content management system, so this was a way to build a decent-looking web presence in just a couple of days. Creating and editing content is simple, so if I'm unavailable and we need a piece of information added to the website, I've got four non-techy people who can do it without breaking a sweat. I'm even testing out an event calendar plugin to let people more easily see our upcoming film schedule.

If you're not using Patron Edge Online for your web presence or to sell tickets, I highly recommend checking out Wordpress, or even Drupal if you need a full-featured content management system without paying full-time web developers to build and maintain a custom website.

What tools do you use at your organization to automate back office tasks or keep things flowing smoothly on the administrative side? Share your experience in the comments.

Tomorrow is Museum Day!

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:01:00 GMT

I hope all of you museums out there are participating in the national Museum Day tomorrow, September 27th! Museum day is a great way to get those people who were interested in your organization but not willing to pay admission on the chance that the experience would be disappointing. Get them in, give them lots of information, and maybe even offer a one-day discount for purchasing a membership. For my readers out there from theatres and operas, go visit Smithsonian Magazine's Museum Day site to find out what museums near you are participating. I'm trying to decide between The Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon and Drayton Hall plantation. Have you participated in this event in past years? How has it affected visitors and membership? Leave a quick note in the comments.

Create maps of your patrons using free online tools

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:20:00 GMT

Check out the guest post I wrote today on The User's Edge blog. I explain how to use the RE Export module and a free service called Map a List to create a Google Maps mashup. These tools are not RE-specific though; you can run Marketing Mailing queries and generate a spreadsheet of address info, enabling you to get a visual of where your season ticket holders or major sponsors live.

What do you think? Do you find it useful to be able to visualize trends about your patrons on a map?

Firefox 3 has been released!

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:35:00 GMT

Firefox, the greatest of the modern browsers, released version 3 of their product just about four hours ago and it has already been downloaded nearly 3 million (million!) times. It's more secure, prettier, faster and smarter than anything else out there (yes, even you Safari). I encourage all of you to download and use it exclusively for a better browsing experience. If you need to access your Patron Edge Online Administration Site, you can install the excellent IETab extension and do it all in one browser. With this extension I don't think I've purposely launched Internet Explorer in two or three years, and haven't had run-ins with malware of any kind. And now it even integrates with web apps. For example, I can click a mailto link and it will launch my Gmail composer.

For those who have done a fair amount of PEO design work and had to do any special browser-specific tweaks to make things look the way you want, make sure to test your site in this newest version to ensure that your patrons won't experience any display issues. The US and Canada together have almost hit the one million download mark, so you can be sure that your patrons are using it already.