The result of working together over next few years resulted in the creation of a project called the ‘Online Volunteer Management System’ which is now central to the the success and operation of an organisation delivering a service much in demand. The OVMS is without a doubt a project that has supported the great work of many wonderful people who are willing to donate their expertise for a great cause. CASE is very proud to partner with VISE in this work.

Every few years VISE volunteers from NT, QLD, ACT and VIC meet to network and build on their work. CASE President Darrell Burkey has the honour of joining them this year in Melbourne, Vic to ensure that the OVMS project is meeting their needs, to gain a better understanding of the challenges they meet and to plan for enhancements of the system.

Everyone at CASE would like to thank VISE for the opportunity to apply our skills in a way that benefits so many Australians and would like to express our best wishes for the continued growth and success of the organisation. It’s been a real honour to work with the many people who make VISE such a wonderful organisation and we’d like to congratulate them on 21 years of operation!

Member services are not expected to be effected during this time.

The Global Information Assurance Certification was founded in 1999 to validate the skills of information security professionals. The purpose of GIAC is to provide assurance that a certified individual has theknowledge and skills necessary for a practitioner in key areas of computer, information and software security.

Training for GIAC certifications is provdided by The SANS (SysAdmin,Audit, Network, Security) Institute which was established in 1989 as acooperative research and education organization.

Darrell stated, “Having the opportunity to be trained by top securityexperts who are at the front line of today’s most sophisticated
systems was both challenging and very rewarding. I can’t wait for the opportunity to continue training with SANS”.

CASE staff congratulate Darrell for a job well done.

It should be noted that the On-site Technical Support services is only one project that CASE operates. We provide many other services to member organisations such as database development, specialised web hosting of content management systems, free domain name management, technical and political advocacy, training, co-location and management of servers, network cabling and other services as requested by members.

All systems configured by CASE operate in a manner that any qualified systems administrator can easily manage. We use standard best-practice methodologies that are well known to ensure that member organisations are never dependent on CASE. We are very strongly dedicated to the theory of ‘no vendor lock-in‘ of any type. Also, it is our strict policy never to store member passwords or access information and to ensure members understand that this information resides only within their own records.

CASE retains staff that include qualified UNIX system administrators recognised by the System Administrator’s Guild of Australia, holds GIAC Information Security Certification, a community outreach award from The Australian National University and provides a venue for students to gain valuable experience in the field of ICT. Our patron, Senator Kate Lundy, recognises CASE as a valuable component to the community service sector in the ACT.

Operating from Belconnen for over a decade, CASE is about to take up residence in a new community hub currently being developed by the ACT Government. For more information on Computing Assistance Support & Education Inc. please visit our official site.

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…

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!

Techsoup.org – A vast ICT resource for not-for-profits including valuable templates for essential IT documentation.

www.aiia.com.au/GreenIT – A comprehensive book looking at “green computing” strategies for business and not-for-profits.

act.ly – A site that enables you to start petitions and polls on Twitter, great for online activism!

doingitbetter.net.au – A comprehensive program run by Monash University and partners investigating how to expand the capacity of ICT in the community service sector.

www.ici.qut.edu.au/projects/sustainablefoodculture.jsp – An example of where Federal government’s ARC funding is enabling social action through technology.

prezi.com – A place that allows you to make impressive looking power-point-esq presentations, and can be viewed on a web browser.

Xero.com – “Cloud accouting”. Affordable bookkeeping and financial services for small to medium sized groups, with a Web 2.0 twist.

SalesForce.com – an impressive CRM. They give free licenses to charities and not-for-profits.

OpenOffice.org – A free, professional word processor that rivals, and is compatible with, Microsoft Office.

Overall, a great two days. You can review the Twitter feed of the event here, for further info, links and insights from the day. To review our very own Twitter posts from the day, click here.