A sight to make an IT Director's heart glad

These are some discarded filing trays in a store room. This means that people need paper less, which means less printing, which means less use of printers that keep going wrong. Not that I'm against paper altogether (and there are more pieces of paper on my desk since I wrote that). However there is a good case for using it less where it makes sense. In fact several good cases.

Letter sweep

I liked the idea of Tim Bray's letter sweep http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/03/03/ABC so I've done the same thing.

[a]mazon.co.uk - birthday presents, the odd CD for me.
[b]logger.com - editing this blog.
[c]olly.com - web designers blog. If I click through his feed from Google Reader it never works, so I go straight to his site. Perhaps I ought to tell him.
[d]ownforeveryoneorjustme.com - Useful if a site goes down.
[e]urotp.org - the website of our training organisation. At the moment I'm in between reworks.
[f]acebook.com - like [insert latest stat here]% of the population.
[g]uardian.co.uk - I heart The Guardian.
[h]something - our local intranet.
[i]something - our organisation wide intranet.
[j]obs.wycliffe.org - runs a couple of apps listing vacancies and asking lots of questions of potential recruits.
[k]ingsgateuk.com - I was finding out this churches postcode.
[l]not disclosed for security reasons
[m]anypies.paulmorriss.com - this blog.
[n]ews.bbc.co.uk/weather/ - always good to know.
[o]utlook-trust.org - they use some of our spare office space. We have more available!
[p]aulmorriss.com - my site.
[q] - no default, but the most useful on in the suggested list was this interesting article quora.com/Microsoft/Why-doesnt-Microsoft-understand-tablets.
[r]eplay.waybackmachine.org - previous versions of websites.
[s]tackoverflow.com - top quality programming answers.
[t]echmeme.com - tech news aggregator.
[u]nionbaptist.org - my church.
[v]alidator.w3.org - essential web developers tool.
[w]ycliffe.org.uk - our website, I'm always working on minor changes.
[x] - no default, the most useful was this site about wikis built on the engine that stackoverflow.com uses (don't know why it came up under x).
[y] - no default, though I do visit youtube.com .
[z] - no default, though my recent search for "zero inbox" was at the top.

Is an email address personal data?

I was at a Data Protection seminar last week and this question came up. The answer was "yes, if the email address contains a name". However I wondered if that's always so clear cut:

Alternatives to Dabbledb - my conclusion

This is a follow up to this article - Alternatives to Dabbledb.
In the end I picked Teamdesk (but see update at the end). Here are my conclusions.

Zoho Creator
The deal breaker with this one was that you couldn't display parent records and child records on the same page. Also, according to one person their support isn't so good. From what I can tell they only have one person assigned to support.

So in the end it came down to Infodome or Teamdesk. Looking at their respective pages with wishlists of features it looked like Teamdesk had more people using it. Also, the fact that Teamdesk has other products was encouraging, as it meant that their income wasn't vulnerable to the popularity of one product.

As I started implementing I struggled with the complexity of our data, with four levels of relations to nest. However that's the limitation of these web interfaces and programming-free approach. There were also some niggly things with the way that relations worked, but I could have lived with those.

Due to external reasons we're thinking of using another system to manage the data.

(Update 18 March 2011 - That other system is Highrise, and we've decided to go with that instead. That's not because of a shortcoming of Teamdesk - it is a good equivalent to Dabbledb. However the nature of the data is about people - contacts and cases, not so suited to a rigid database format like Teamdesk or Dabbledb.)

How long have you got? 1 second to a lifetime?

I hope readers of this "work" blog will appreciate the fact that I don't promote the organisation I work for ad nauseum. However I came up with this list a while back. I'm not aware of any concious effort on behalf of our marketing team to cater for every timescale, it just seems to have worked out like that.

If you have...
1 second - like Wycliffe Bible Translators UK on Facebook.
1 minute - pray
1 hour - From Eden to Eternity (actually it's a bit over an hour, but I'm sure you won't notice the time going).
1 day - Wycliffe and Me
1 week - Window on Wycliffe
1 month - Engage
1 year - One-to-One
1 lifetime - long term work

Finding out about IT in Wycliffe

We're holding an event so that you can find out about IT in Wycliffe, not just in the UK office, but in all the places where Wycliffe works in the world. It's called Check IT Out.

Alternatives to dabbledb

(Update: I've come to a conclusion.)
I'm doing some work in my spare time for a local charity. They are using dabbledb, which has been acquired by twitter. The future is not certain, though they are supporting existing customers and say they will give 60 days notice before they shut it down.

I looked around for alternatives and came across this helpful article - migrating away from dabbledb. It lists a number of alternatives. I'm still investigating the alternatives, but I thought you might find it useful to know what I've found so far.

Zoho Creator
They are the only one I've found to have a specific dabbledb migration tool, which takes the schema and sucks it in. What it can't do is spot which tables link to what, but once you tell it that it brings all the data in. Once you've created your app joining two tables can be done, but not through the interface, you have to resort to the scripting language. Update: you can join tables. However, the fact that it has a scripting language increases its power. If you want to make forms available to non-users you can ask them to do that, it can't be done yourself. (Update: this is a one-off and you can do it with subsequent forms - see comment below.) As you'd expect with a web page, form layout is pretty basic, though you can put fields in a second column. The form editor has drag and drop. Reporting options are varied: you can have lists, grid, chart, calendar, HTML page, as well as pivot table and pivot charts.

"Creator" is one of many applications they offer.

Teamdesk
Teamdesk offer a Dabbledb migration tool, though unless I'm missing something, it's just an import tool that reads in all your CSV data. It's been around for 5 years, which is quite a long time in this business, but is probably a good thing. It looks a little outdated, but is quite capable. When I imported data it didn't recognise data that was a picklist, but by using the move column function you can convert an existing column to a picklist. It was easy to set up relationships between tables. As well as normal data table views you can have summary, chart, calendar and timeline views.

ForeSoft, the company behind Teamdesk, have a small number of other applications.

Infodome
Infodome is Flash-based, so looks a little more swish than the others. The import from dabbledb worked well. You can define table relations through the interface. You don't seem to be able to make forms available to non-users. Forms have free-form layout (probably easy because of Flash) and you can have subforms. It's reporting function allows you to do simple grouping and totalling, as well as just listing things, so less options than the other two.

Infodome is the company's only product.

There were three others that I'm not considering.

Caspio is another Flash-based one, but needs you to host it on your own site, even though you work on designing your database via their site. After I signed up for their trial I was contacted by someone wanting to help me, so that's good customer support. One gripe on the import - it couldn't recognise data types, like dates, by default, and made everything text.

Qrimp looks quite capable, but the company seems quite small. I asked for an account on their demo system and never got one. Although you get two free months (all the others have 14 day trials) you only get that by signing up with your Paypal account.

Intuit Quickbase is an order of magnitude more expensive than the others above.

MyTaskHelper had a lot of features in beta when I first looked, but since then the product seems to have matured - see the discussion below.

It's always hard to evaluate suppliers without having access to their financials. You don't want them to go under, or be too successful like Dabble and get bought out. Zoho boasts a large number of users. I couldn't tell much about the other companies.

Interim Conclusion
I had hoped that writing this would help me decide which to use, but I think I need to try and do more real stuff before I see if it fits what I want. I haven't mentioned features that they mostly or all have - separate applications, users, dashboards, email functions, sample/template applications etc.

The real conclusion is in another post.