Vertabase is proud to have been honored by the Michigan Council of Women and Technology at their annual Partnership Recognition and Scholarship Award event.

 This great organization encourages the advancement of women in technology related fields through mentoring, Summer tech camps for girls, laptop awards and, to-date, 0ver $300,000 in direct scholarships to a remarkable group of people (through the MCWT Foundation). Keep up the great work!

          

Question: How can government be made more efficient with project management software or by using project management in public administration?

Answer: Project management software provides a clear structure in which all steps of a public works project can be spelled out.

A basic break-down of the steps in a project can provide an effective operational overview of municipal or Federal government projects.  This gives executives or public sector employees a clear way to track progress, identify bottlenecks and learn from past projects -because the tasks involved and people or departments associated with those tasks are clearly identified.  This level of visibility in public administration can breed increased efficiency and transparency in the use of government resources.

Public CIO and Governing.com picked up a recent Vertabase press release highlighting the City of Fort Lauderdale’s IT department as a great example of project management software in the public sector.

“For us, the challenge was to implement a structured and formal approach to project management,” said Tim Edkin, Director of IT Services, City of Fort Lauderdale. “About a year ago, we started investigating our options. We looked at four or five project management solutions, including Microsoft Project. Eventually, we chose Vertabase because it is easy to use, it’s well designed and it’s well supported. In the past, if a project was late there wasn’t much we could learn from it. Now, we’re very analytical. We see what’s happening and manage accordingly. By providing an effective operational overview for City Hall, Vertabase has improved the way we manage our resources.”

As far as the technology involved, the City of Fort Lauderdale is running Vertabase with a flexible group of technologies that play well together, starting with Adobe’s ColdFusion using an MS SQL back-end integrated with SAP/Business Object’s Crystal Reports.

          

Export Reports.com added a new feature this week. ExportReports.com will now embed any images in your Basecamp project in the exported pdf. Supported formats include: bmp, gif, jfif, jpeg, jpg, png, pnm, raw, tif, tiff, wbmp

          

I’d been meaning to write a review of the XO Laptop for the last couple of months.

This recent article in the Wall Street Journal finally prompted me to put this response together.

I purchased one through the special promotion and our kids love it. And continue to love it.  It has proven to be a staple when they are bored at home or when we travel -particularly to places without connectivity.

The main functions they use are exactly the creative programs that come pre-loaded.

They are more intuitive than the off-the-shelf equivalents and still offer a tremendous range of creativity -particularly Tom Tom and eToys.

As a parent, I find that the XO has a different paradigm than a traditional computer. One that fosters creative thinking. It is built for kids to explore and to offer them a language/medium to express ideas that are often hard to describe but easy to show.  Whereas my PC (Windows or MAC) is designed primarily to increase productivity -to make it easier to do x or y task.

The fact that the web browser is clunky doesn’t bother them. If they want to play on the web, they’ll go to a Windows machine. Just like if they want to watch TV they’ll go to a television.  (I was hoping I could use it for using web-based software while away but neither the built in browser nor the XO ready version of Opera were up to the task.)

A big favorite with my kids is the Journal feature. They love being able to see what each one did and to add on to previous work. Its a lot easier for them than “saving” files  or searching folders or a network for someone else’s work.

Overall, its a keeper (and even something they fight over).

          

Happy to announce the beta launch of ExportReports.com!
It creates PDF reports of your Basecamp projects.

ExportReports.com is a collaborative effort with ColdFusion guru Terrence Ryan.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

On the technical side, Export Reports.com is written in Adobe ColdFusion 8 ’cause it works so well with PDF’s (-and we’re big fans anyway).