Learn about integrating Joomla and CiviCRM for a great FOSS solution in organization and management from small fundraising events to national campaigns.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Basis of org infrastructure and framework that helps visualize the entire operation

2.   Demonstration of installation and ease of configuration

3.   Importance of many points of contact within one website and demonstrate ease in teaching users to use it.

Level: Intermediate

External financial audit and more recently internal audit requirements are now requiring a risk assessment of the IT function as part of the audit.  This means that auditors will be applying more scrutiny to IT departments, their management, and their operations.  This session will provide an overview of the requirements (from the auditee's perspective) and provide guidance on how to prepare documentation and update policies to address the things that auditors will be looking for.  Will also touch on PCI DSS requirements and documenting compliance.

Session Takeaways:

1.  PCI DSS compliance requirements and documentation

2.  Understanding of what IT auditors are looking for

3.  Guidance on preparing information for IT auditors

Level:  Intermediate

Solutions built on SharePoint continue to grow at a rapid pace.  As more organizations implement SharePoint, the need to revisit best practices proves to be increasingly important.  A successful SharePoint implementation starts just as a successful web development project begins - by understanding your audiences needs.  In this session, we'll look at user-centered approaches that are designed to ensure the successful implementation of SharePoint.

Session Takeaways:

1.  How to define key user groups and their needs.

2.  Defining and documenting the best solutions to user issues.

3.  Align solution with the mission of your organization.

Level: Intermediate

What to consider before taking your website live. So you're about to press the button on the new website launch. What are the final checks you need to make? Who should do what and when?

Session Takeaways:

1.   Practical, easy to follow steps to follow before going live

2.   Know what resources are going to be needed to launch your next generation  web presence

3.   Insight into what to expect - common hurdles and challenges and how to resolve them

Level: Intermediate

Overview of IT-related risks and compliance requirements (e.g. PCI DSS, privacy) for not-for-profits.  Also strategies for mitigating some of those risks in key areas like password security, data/information exchange with constituents, and internal security practices.

You can view a sample of the presentation at: http://www.myitk.com/downloads/hscpa_InfoSec09npo.pdf  The presentation would be updated for 2009 crime statistics and privacy requirements generalized to address multiple jurisdictions.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Better understanding of IT and data-related risks

2.  Simple and (often free) solutions to address IT risks

3.  Free references to look to for guidance (e.g. SANS for IT policy templates)

Level: Beginner

It seems crazy that Perez, The Defamer and other A-List bloggers haven't been mentioning all of the cool things that are being done with APIs. Well, we want to rectify that by showing you just how hot APIs really are. This session will expose some of the craziest experiences built using APIs, and give you insight into the creative process behind the work. You'll see real examples and have a chance to ask questions of the people who built them.

Session Takeaways:

1.  What APIs are best suited for

2.   What is possible with APIs

3.   What kind of effort and expertise are needed to succeed

Level: Intermediate

In this case study, we'll present best practices from in creating Finance Portal facilitating team collaboration and providing a document library repository for Search for Common Ground.  A Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, Search for Common Ground is dedicated to transforming the way the world deals with conflict, promoting cooperative solutions instead of adversarial approaches.

Session Takeaways:

1.  How to integrating disparate functions into a SharePoint solution

2.  Creating a central document repository

3.  What worked and what didn't - best practice in implementation

Level: Intermediate

Come 2010, the IT world is looking at a paradigm shift in operating systems with the increase stability of Linux distributions and other alternative choices, what is a single staff IT department with little or no budget to do?

Session Takeaways:

1.  Learn about all-in-one web-based applications like Zimbra and Ulteo

2.  Learn about free open source software (FOSS)

3.   Learn about alternative operating systems that integrate existing proprietary applications

Level: Intermediate

Software as a Service offers an important and wide-ranging set of benefits to nonprofit users--large and small.  This workshop is led by a SaaS provider offering solutions to large and small organizations primarily focused on client management and community resource mapping.  Learn the lessons already won.  We will not be focusing on software or features, but rather the specific benefits and challenges of working with SaaS providers, how to ensure appropriate contracting and services, and how to work with SaaS providers to gain leveraged integration of your data without doing it yourself.  

Session Takeaways:

1.  Is the SaaS Model for you?  A decision matrix

2.  How to Select and Contract with SaaS Providers

3. How to integrate data among your SaaS Providers 

Level: Intermediate

Major points to look at when evaluating using a cloud computing application to support a business function: security, data ownership, business continuity, e-discovery, compliance, vendor contracting, ROI

Session Takeaways:

1.  There are business risks and IT risks that are involved with Cloud Computing

2.  Cloud Computing doesn't eliminiate the need for IT staff--it changes their role to management and oversight rather than executio

3.  All organizations need to assess and address Cloud Computing risks before beginning to work with this technology platform

Level: Intermediate

Attend this session to hear how nonprofits are using apps from the Salesforce.com AppExchange to manage their mission work and integrate multiple pieces of their organization together.

Session Takeaways:

1.   Learn about the latest nonprofit specific apps available

2.   Learn about the latest social media apps available

3.   Learn what technology nonprofits are using for this seamless integration and accessibility to the AppExchange

Level: Intermediate

Discussion of lessons learned, and ways to make sure you're learning from past mistakes.  Hopefully all participants will come together to share their learning strategies.  

Focusing on the idea that we all make mistakes, workshop would open with a description of some mistakes made by the presenters in the past and what they did to learn from them.  Participants would be invited to talk about how they learn from their mistakes, without getting hung up on them.

Session Takeaways:

1.  An understanding that all projects contain a mistake we can learn from

2.   Ideas for how to learn from our mistakes so we don't repeat them

3.   Reassurance that we can't avoid all mistakes, and that we have to move forward knowing we'll make more mistakes.

Level: Beginner

Whether you are a team of one or many in a barely surviving non-profit, the task of running a busy network or website can take its toll on your nerves and psyche. Learning techniques taken from contempory ergonomics and Asian health practices lend benefits to body, mind and spirit.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Proper body mechanics

2.  Balance and centering of mind, body and spirit through simple meditation

3.  Easy ways to implement into organization's culture both strategically and technically

Level: Beginner

This session looks at the challanges of providing IT security in the NPO environment. IT staff of community based organizations face unique challanges when implementing security. How do you protect your systems and maintain high availability to resources when many of your staff are volunteers, part-time or working remote? This session will provide an alternative approach to traditional 'perimeter' based systems protection and explore strategies on how to implement practical security measures.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Strategies to protect systems while providing high availablity

2.  General principles of system and data protection

3.  An Innovative alternative to traditonal security policies

Level: Intermediate

Open APIs were made widely available in the past several years. The real question however, is how have non-profit organizations been able to leverage Open APIs to further their mission and how successful have they really been? As a non-profit organization who is considering embracing Open API technology, it's critical to understand how to measure its success and ROI. This session will review how using Open API technology can help you further your mission. API technology continues to evolve as non-profit organizations are pushing the limits of current functionality. What does the future hold for API technology and how can non-profit organizations continue to innovate and influence the next generation of open integration?

 Session Takeaways:

1.  How have Open APIs impacted non-profit organizations?   What trends have we seen over the past several years? 

2.   How you can use Open APIs to further your mission? How can you measure the success of using Open APIs?

3.   Open APIs continue to evolve and provide non-profit organizations with more possibilities of integrating online and offline tool

Level: Advanced

Open Atrium is an intranet or team portal distribution of the wildly popular Drupal Content Management System. Open Atrium is free to use and is available under free and open source software licenses. (Learn more at http://openatrium.com/about)

Due to its Drupal underpinnings you are free to customize it to suit your organization's requirements and you also benefit from innovations create and shared by other organizations or developers within the Drupal and Open Atrium Communities.

In this sessions we will demonstrate the out of the box features of Open Atrium, as well as custom configuration.  We will discuss hosting options, and the benefits of using an Open Source intranet.

Session Takeaways:

1.  What is Open Atrium

2.  How can your organization use it?

3.  Questions answered

Level: Intermediate

Boards and top management are driving IT organizations to investigate outsourcing as a way to address growing technology needs without significant staff growth and/or capital expenditure. However, the ability to successfully outsource is dependent upon the skills of the retained IT staff.  This session will walk through a management-level framework for outsourcing and retained organization design that will structure the analysis and the recommendations in a format understandable to top management and boards of directors.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Insourcing vs. Outsourcing Analytical Framework

2.  Retained Organization Design Principles

3.   Approach/Methodology for Executing the Insourcing vs. Outsourcing Analysis

Level: Intermediate

Reduce your carbon footprint and preserve your budget by exploring virtual servers to meet your IT needs.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Overview of virtualization

2.  Benefits and Risks with Virtualization

3.  Real world success stories and tips to get started

Level: Intermedaite

This workshop will explore how to adapt solid project management practices to web sites based on Drupal, Joomla, Plone or other CMSs. Planning, architecting, designing, implementing, and releasing these types of sites have their own distinctive groove. Issues to discuss include:

--coordinating organizational staff, designers and implementers in a single team

--realistic scheduling and pacing

--when and how to do visual design for a CMS

--applicability of "agile development" concepts

Session Takeaways:

1. Recommendations of effective project management and communication tools

2.  Understanding sitemap, wireframe and other critical planning documents

3.  Recommendations on roles and staffing and effective team

Level: Intermediate

Security is like play putty these days; everything is malleable and every changing. How is an IT manager with limited experience in a low-budget nonprofit to keep up without breaking the bank?

Session Takeaways:

1.  Dealing with passwords

2.   Access Control Lists (ACL) management

3.   Learn major entry points to your network and servers to be aware of and techniques to help increase security.

Level: Intermediate

While new technologies are constantly emerging, rarely do they give nonprofits the freedom and convenience of integration without limiting them to expensive, proprietary vendors. In this session, we will showcase an "Open Civic Engagement Platform" that knits together low-cost, high-quality solutions to power nonprofit communications. This robust platform has a solid track record of handling diverse needs - from startup organizations to some of the largest nonprofits. If your organization is seeking a way to bring together web content management, email broadcasting, relationship management, online activism, e-commerce and more, this session will provide concrete examples and an informative overview of what to expect from leading solutions.

This platform is built on a set of hosted tools that play well with others via "Open APIs". Key players in this new software ecosystem include:

    * Salesforce.com and their game-changing software + services donation program

    * Plone, a powerful and user-friendly open-source content management system, including ecommerce tools

    * Salsa/Democracy In Action, an online advocacy and donation system

    * Vertical Response, Exact Target and others: powerful email broadcasting tools

Given Salesforce.com Foundations donation of licenses to nonprofits (over 6,000 organizations benefiting with a 97% satisfaction rate), this enterprise tool is readily accessible and already proving a powerful solution for nonprofits. The Salesforce.com Foundation funded the initial integration between Plone and salesforce.com, which has been constantly improved over the last five years.

This session will provide a variety of demos of the technology, building on the success of the session from the 2009 conference (and subsequent webinars and presentations), including new demonstrations of donation handling, event registration/management, and making data in salesforce interactive in Plone.

Session Takeaways:

1.  What the new age of open, connected, software flexible enough to meet nonprofit needs looks like

2.  When these tools make sense and what it takes to get them in place for a nonprofit

3.  Real-world demonstrations of production-quality integration between best-of-breed systems like Plone, Salesforce, Salsa

Level: Intermediate

An overview of what CRM can bring to a nonprofit, how it can help you connect to your client, customers, donors, and volunteers. It will review what needs to be done before you even start to better understand your business model, chose the right system and ensure project success. Focus will be on the appropriate processes and common pitfalls and stuggles that nonprofits face when participating in a project of this type. Attendees will learn the importance of maintaining the "truth" in their data and how to accomplish that goal.

Session Takeaways:

1.  Understanding CRM it strengths and concequences

2.  Finding the right product and implementation strategy

3.   7 tips to project sucess

Level: Intermediate

There is a lot of marketing fluff about Green IT. This session will provide attendees with information about how choices about your IT infrastructure can reduce your direct hardware/software costs, lower your carbon footprint and improve staff productivity and morale. We'll also discuss how your old computer equipment can continue to provide value to other organizations when the technology has reached the end of its useful life to you.

Session Takeaways:

1.   Ability to measure an organization's carbon footprint

2.   Techniques for greening IT in different areas

3.   Opportunity to share how your organization has implemented Green IT practices

Level: Intermediate

This session will provide an in depth look at how organizations can work with open source technology vendors to best leverage the open source technologies.  While the session will focus on web Content Management Systems and Constituent Relationship Systems, many of the lessons also apply to desktop software as well.

The presenter will talk about what it means to participate in an open source software project, and why it is important for the long term success of your own project.

Common language and concepts of open source software development will also be "demystified."

If you have ever wondered what the benefits and potential risks of going with an open source vendor rather than a proprietary vendor are, and how your experience may differ between the two, this session is for you!

Session Takeaways:

1.  Why "community" is important in open source projects

2.  Benefits and Challenges of working with open source vendors and software

3.  The best ways to leverage open source software development.

Level: Intermediate

Many a manager has wished for the opportunity to "blow up" their departmental org chart and simply start over.  Join one manager who did just that, taking an internet department in crisis from ruin to riches in one year, making sound critical decisions as well as some major mistakes along the way.  This session will provide practical advice about:

-- Building upper-level support for a departmental reorganization

-- Developing departmental structures can meet organizational strategic goals and objectives

-- Developing flexible job descriptions that demand needed skill sets but can evolve over time

-- Recruiting, selecting, hiring, and mentoring key staff

-- Building a collaborative team of individual star performers

-- Using departmental policies, procedures, and process to model organizational change

-- Identifying similar (and dissimilar) teams and skill sets in other departments that will complement and extend the impact of your own department

-- How to use this "extended" departmental structure to drive organizational growth and change management in the service of your organizational mission

-- How to evolve toward your ideal departmental structure even if you cannot start from scratch

Session Takeaways:

1.  Building a department from scratch is not simple or easy: mistakes and missteps you should avoid.

2.  Success lies in a departmental structure that is tied tightly & practically to your org's strategic goals and objectives.

3.  Successfully modelling and executing integration within your own department  builds credibility and confidence within your org

Level: Advanced