The Official CASE Blog

CASE is a membership based cooperative of over thirty Australian non-profit organisations who identified a significant gap in the ICT services provided to our sector and created a shared services solution to address that gap.

As such CASE is a technical support service owned and operated by community development and non-profit organisations.

The resulting services have proven over a  ten year period to be appropriately targeted to the needs of the sector and capable of delivering superior technical services at reasonable costs.

Indeed, if this were not the case and other appropriate services were available, there simply would be no need for the sector to operate it’s own service. However, the needs of the sector are not typically compatible with the business solutions provided by commercial vendors who often times simply apply standard business solutions and have a very limited understanding of the unique and challenging environment that we operate in.

CASE does not compete with commercial services and indeed where such services are appropriate for use by members, we establish working relationships such as we have with Dell Computers on behalf of members.

Organisations involved in CASE can be proud that they are showing by example how the sector can work together to establish effective services to meet their mutual goals of improving services to those in our community living with disadvantage. Membership organisations also have the significant advantage of ownership which gives them the benefit of being stakeholders in the service. Funding contracts now require that best practice is followed in areas such as adhering to privacy regulations and disaster recovery. As such the need for such services is even more critical than before.

The ultimate strategy of CASE is that by providing superior transparent ICT services to member organisations, we are effecting significant community development by reallocating administrative overheads to the much more important area of service delivery. This ensures that less people will be sleeping on the streets, more people receive proper mental health care and that even the smallest of services will have access to proper business systems…

The Melbourne Joomla Users group has, once again, put on a great weekend worth of informative workshops, talks and lectures. This is the third year running and the attendance looked healthier than it’s ever been which is a great sign for this open-source project.

Amongst the attendees was varying levels of experience and skill with Joomla and the MJUG team presented material that was appropriate for everyone. Andrew Eddie gave us further details about the upcoming Joomla 1.6 release; while there’s no launch date yet it’s worth noting some of the features that were discussed. One of Joomla’s drawbacks (features?) is that there’s no clean way to define new usergroups with specific and access controls -  Joomla comes with 9 pre-defined user groups that provide a simple user structure right out of the box. But for administrators that need to fine-tune user access, they must work outside the Joomla core, likely utilising a third-party extension. When 1.6 is released, the option to define new groups with unique permissions will be available. Permissions will be able to be set to menus, modules and other content items. This will mean a huge amount of new flexibility in terms of who can see and modify what, opening the door to the possibility of administrators running on a non-Joomla powered website with unique user groups to migrate to Joomla in the future.

You can read more about the upcoming release of Joomla here.

Another good talk was on optimising your website for speed. We were presented with a number of tools that help webmasters assess the overall performance of their website. Yahoo’s “Yslow” plugin for Firefox being a popular way to record a comprehensive range of speed related stats for your website. “ChacheClear” is a handy little cache-clearing tool for Firefox that ensures that your speed results aren’t messed up by local browser cache! The use of Gzip, a popular compression method was also encouraged (This can be swtiched on in Joomla’s global configuration, and some professional templates come with options to optimise for Gzip).

Sam Moffat gave another security talk, most of his tips and tricks should be adopted immediately by anyone concerned with the integrity of their website. Full details from his presentation can be found here.

Overall I would call Melbourne Joomla Day a very valuable event for people working, or interested in working with, Joomla. It’s a great chance to go face-to-face with the people behind the software and they’re always more than willing to answer questions. Given the size of this year’s event, I can only assume there’ll be another run next year, bigger and better than ever before!

You can view all the speaker presentatons here. The official Twitter feed can be reviewed here!