What do you use Progress for? Just as your donor database? Or maybe only to help you run your membership schemes? Have you thought about expanding your use of Progress to encompass other departments? Many other customers have and find using one database for all their organisational needs extremely rewarding.
"Do you remember your first website?" asks Robin Fisk. "Maybe, like me, you look back with pride and amusement at your unsophisticated attempts to put up your first pages on the World Wide Web, more in hope than expectation that anyone would read them...."
"Progress in PCs and IT been amazing," writes Robin Fisk, "and our ability to absorb and embrace technology has been tested like no generation before us. True, not all innovations gain market acceptance, but once an innovation gets credibility we seem happy to make it part of our lives...."
Robin Fisk offers advice on taking on new staff. "There was a time when if you said you worked with computers, it would engender an image of a white-coated technician with thick-rimmed glasses and biros in his (not her) top pocket..."
Robin Fisk looks at computer viruses past and present. "For a brief period in the 1990s there was a time when the internet was an exciting, open environment where information could be freely and innocently exchanged. Viruses were confined to humans, and Worms to your garden or perhaps your domestic pet...."
"How much privacy are you prepared to surrender for convenience?" writes Robin Fisk "It's a trade-off we are resigned to making as we increasingly trust the internet for our personal and business transactions. We want convenience, they want information..."
In Autumn 2006, Robin Fisk wrote about the new Vista interface. "Microsoft will shortly launch new versions of the most successful computer software ever produced - Windows Vista and Office 2007...."
Robin Fisk offers some advice on avoiding Spam - "The months of September and October 2006 saw an unprecedented rise in spam - 59% more spam was sent in those months, to the point where a staggering 91% of all email is spam..."
Robin Fisk recalls that "Before the Windows and Mac interfaces became popular, personal computers relied on keyboard-driven commands. Older readers will remember - sometimes fondly - those old DOS applications that were character-based, not graphical...."
There are many high profile IT projects that go spectacularly over budget - but what makes this happen? Robin Fisk says what he thinks.
