These PowerPoint slides from an online training present best practices, processes, and tips for caring for your organization’s data.

This is the basic language I use in many projects to explain how different databases are deployed to the user. It usually works well coming out of conversations with clients who are throwing database names at me and asking for instant comparisons between them. This frame has helped many of my clients to focus a bit on the type of solution they are looking for and to avoid blindly comparing available options.

Deploying Databases

There are essentially three categories of databases:

View the report at: http://www.idealware.org/IW_software_survey_report.pdf

As Quoted from Laura Quinn of Idealware:

"Thanks very much to everyone who filled out the nonprofit software survey that went out in July - the one intended to assess the feasibility of creating a nonprofit dedicated to providing frank, Consumer Reports style reviews of nonprofit software tools."

"The results - from 261 responses - were very interesting.  There is a huge amount of time and money being spent on software.  The estimates of the survey participants alone total to 7.7 Million dollars worth of time and money spent evaluating and purchasing software (and this is just 261 of more than 550,000 nonprofits who filed 990s last year). The results of this spending are not promising, however:  only 58% surveyed felt their organization had the right software tools to do their job, and only 49% felt their tech team was aware of most of the tools that would be helpful.  There's a lot more information in the survey report, which is available for free online.  "

CompuMentor, as part of our work on a PCF-funded project, has developed a set of best practices documents for Windows installation and configuration. These are openly licensed documents, which are intended for use by the NTAP community. Please feel free to download and make use of the documents. If you do use these documents, please take the time to provide us your feedback on these documents, or upload modified versions, so that we can integrate changes back into the "master" document.

1. Windows Updates
2. Anti-virus software.
3. Microsoft Office (or other office suite)
4. Updates for Microsoft Office
5. Any line-of-business applications
6. Download and install decompression utility such as FreeZip.
7. Download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader.
8. Install Flash and any other desired multimedia players (RealPlayer, for example)
9. Turn on Automatic Updates
10. Disable Windows Firewall
11. Set up user on computer

1. Confirm hardware compatibility. Don't skip this step.
   * Check vendor's Web site to confirm compatibility of hardware as shipped from the manufacturer.
   * If the computer is a white-box (generic), look up each component individually.

Summary of Best Practices for Windows desktop installations.

There are a plethora of different best practices and guidelines around the Windows desktop environment. We have tried to focus on information around security and secure deployment of Windows desktop systems. This document summarizes the different best practices we found, and includes a listing of the most relevant items. A number of best practice documents are geared towards networked “enterprise� environments, which are outside the scope of the PCF project.

At the outset, there are a number of best practices that are “common knowledge�, practices that are in common use and already part of CompuMentor’s standard technology practices. Though often part of best practices documents, they are set out here as core techniques that all Windows installations should take into account.

This document can grow into a guide for automatically installing Microsoft Office over a network. Here's an outline, we can grow it over time.

1. Create administrative installation point.
2. Patch administrative installation point.
3. Customize installation if desired (create transform file).
4. Deploy package using Group Policy or batch file.

This batch file will silentlly install Office XP

msiexec /i \\server\officexp$\pro.msi /qb+