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NYSDA wishes to express our sincere appreciation to the businesses and individuals that have donated software, hardware, services, and their time to us. These donations help us to continue our substantive work in providing legal support services to public defender offices, defense attorneys and others.
Donations and other sponsorships:
 Until now, NYSDA has relied on a “bundled” backup solution that was included with Windows® server operating systems called NTBackup which does not provide a complete solution to catastrophic failures of hard drives or other system components. At best NTBackup would only restore data files (the operating system would need to be reloaded “from scratch” first) and has a reputation for not being 100% reliable. Now, with the generosity of Paragon Software Group, we have a complete backup/restoral solution for any server faliure. Paragon’s Drive Backup 10 Server is the top-level disaster recovery & system migration solution for both physical & virtual Windows® environments. With Drive Backup 10 Server, NYSDA can now fully recover any lost server simply by booting the system with Paragon’s “boot CD” (included with the server software) and then putting in the recovery CD which Drive Backup 10 creates from an initial system backup done prior to any failure. This restoral procedure typically takes under 30 minutes and yields a full recovery! In the past completely restoring a failed NYSDA mail server had taken almost two full days.
 As it is for any law firm needing to keep tabs on client cases, responding to and efficiently tracking NYSDA’s over 2,000 direct service request “cases” accumulating annually has been a problem from the organization’s inception. Having, for years, used database technology that required updating and upgrading as our computers and operating systems changed, NYSDA needed to bring our intake system up to date as well as to pursue additional tools for tracking research requests. Also, as most service requests now originate through email, it was important that any new case intake tracking system work seamlessly with NYSDA’s email system, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook.
Public Folder HelpDesk for Outlook from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions (www.kalmstrom.com) has provided the perfect solution as it is both intuitive to use and powerful in it’s tracking and reporting capabilities and was donated to NYSDA by kalmstrom.com. Very importantly, the learning curve is practically nonexistent because it is directly integrated with Outlook as an “add-in,” meaning that after it is installed (a very simple process handled automatically the first time the Public Folder is accessed by the user), it appears to just be a part of Outlook with its own icons and menu items on Outlook’s Toolbar. The ability to add a new case with two mouse clicks (one to add and the other one to open/edit) directly from within the email program has significantly streamlined our work flow.
PF HelpDesk for Outlook has a myriad of features including automatic email notifications, mailbox monitoring, and detailed ticket history. It generates FAQ answers easily and adds them to the “tickets” (cases) for automating replies. It also creates Outlook tasks from tickets or vice versa.
Included free with PF HelpDesk is KBase for Outlook, an application that creates a knowledge base within Outlook with full text searching capability which can be built from rich text, html, attached files, email, etc. Kalmstrom also includes the OLAP Reporting Tool for Excel with PF HelpDesk. This program, per the Kalmstrom website, “facilitates business intelligence by helping management study and draw conclusions from data”.
Although retail site licence pricing for PF HelpDesk is $1,4000 USD, Kalmstrom generously donates the product no cost to many charities and not-for-profit organizations including NYSDA. There is, however, a nominal charge for annual support which is, we have found, excellent. Any support questions we have needed to ask have almost always been responded to the same day. Once, with a late afternoon support question, the reply came the next morning as their offices are in Sweden and the time differential impacted the response.
It is noteworthy that Kalmstrom also offers free organizational licenses for several of their other products. Check their website for further details.
Backing up NYSDA’s documents every day has proven to be a challenge due to the traditional high cost of “industrial strength” backup solutions as well as procuring reliable storage devices and media. However, it seems like the companies that sell these thousand dollar plus software packages are not aware that we are living in the twenty-first century. Backup solutions no longer need to be costly, especially with the ever falling prices of hard drives. What once took a fancy (with associated cost) external tape drive, expensive media and esoteric software can now be done with a sub-hundred dollar external USB hard drive and very reasonably priced copy/file synchronization software.
Super Flexible File Synchronizer costs well under a hundred dollars and has more (or as many) bells and whistles as any of the old school, high priced backup “solutions”. The list of features goes on forever, and (with the Pro version), installing SuperFlex as a service guarantees it will run as needed for a long as your machine is up.
NYSDA has been using SuperFlex for several years now and it hasn’t skipped a beat. One nice feature (of the literally scores of both essential and “nice to have” features) is Versioning. With this enabled, documents with multiple revisions can be stored. Levels are user-configured. There have been several occasions when an attorney or other staff needed to roll back a document they were working on, to an older draft. SuperFlex’s ability to rename/store previous versions of documents saved the day each time. Having the ability to quickly copy the synchronized file from an external hard drive instead of having to search for a stored-away backup tape, then load, rewind and finally locate the file from an unwieldy indexing scheme was also easy to take. The combination of external hard drive storage and affordable, reliable backup software like Super Flexible File Synchronizer is hard to beat.
 Ever increasing demand for gains in productivity coupled with decreasing resources make tools which extend the reach of network administrators invaluable by saving both time and expense. One such tool is PA Server Monitor.
This system “utility” silently monitors a myriad of defined Windows Server events for critical conditions and instantly send alerts by email and/or text message to one or more persons when a monitored event is triggered by the system. It has provided significant assistance to NYSDA in the monitoring and management our several servers.
Power Admin LLC, who builds and distributes PA Server Monitor, describes it this way: PA Server Monitor is a powerful, yet simple to use software solution to monitor your servers and network hardware. PA Server Monitor will closely monitor your systems and notify you of failures or performance problems and run actions you define to minimize business impact.
For a limited time, PA Server Moniter Lite, is being offered free of charge in exchange for a link to their website. Click here to read more about this offer.
 The volumes of printed documents that NYSDA generates seems to grow exponentially each year, and “balancing” printer resources judiciously between staff had become somewhat problematic until KrawaSoft’s donation of a license for Print365, their client-server application program which provides an abundance of “precise information about print jobs”.
Print365, among other capabilities, allows us to see how many pages of documents are being printed on any of our half dozen network printers. With that information, it is now much easier to decide which of the printers is under (or over) utilized and allocate them accordingly. This results in savings of both money and staff time waiting for printers to be freed up and/or having to sort out jobs.
Additionally, Print365 provides a variety of reports including graphic charts, and logs extremely detailed information about print jobs including date/time, printer name, computer name, document, pages in document, copies, color mode, duplex mode, paper size, print quality, paper length, paper width, scale, and orientation.
Conceptworld Corporation was founded in the year 2000. The company, headquarted in Chennai, India, and developer of several useful utility programs, has generously donated twenty licenses to NYSDA for one of their products called RecentX.
RecentX is a 1-click, super-fast way of getting to documents, folders, programs and websites that you have previously accessed. Basically, it’s like having a Windows “History” (as it “Recent Documents” or Word’s File History) on steroids. Conceptworld, on their website, says that they “developed this software because like you, even we were annoyed with the tedious and hierarchical way of accessing recent documents, recent folders, recent files, recent programs, websites & bookmarks (Favorites) in Windows”. Staff at NYSDA has found it to be quite effective and user friendly. It keeps track of access for up to the last eight weeks and has a realtime search window to make getting back very fast and easy, saves significant time and effort, and costs around twenty dollars (single license).
dtSearch Corp. - develops, manufactures and sells the award-winning dtSearch® line of products. Known for its "industrial-strength" (PC Magazine) ability to instantly search gigabytes of text, the dtSearch product line operates in traditional desktop and network settings, as well as in Web-based environments.  dtSearch® has proven to be an extremly user-friendly, fast and technically advanced in-house text retrieval program for NYSDA's over 100,000 legal, research and archival documents including Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, ZIP, HTML and text files. In addition to the over two dozen full-text search options, it has the ability, using its "web indexing spider" to index other organization's web sites to make their content instantly searchable from a user's local hard drive.
Dataenter - designer and distributer of several utilities for Microsoft Mail, Microsoft Exchange and the Internet including XWall™ for Microsoft Exchange. XWall™ is a SPAM firewall that has virtually eliminated the continually annoying SPAM that NYSDA has been increasingly receiving. It is an extremely fast and feature-rich program that installs easily and works flawlessly. In addition to having full support for MAPS and RBL/SLS/SPAM databases, it has a built-in artificial intelligence feature called Bayesian (statistical) filtering which actually "learns" from the by scanning incoming email for specific words and building a "vocabulary". It also block attachments, strip HTML formatting, can encrypt and compress messages and fully supports virus checking.
Workshare Technology - Workshare® Deltaview® is described by the company  as the world's leading document comparison tool, compares two versions of a document and produces an accurate comparison. Although Workshare® Deltaview® integrates with and extends the functionality of current Document Management Systems (DMS) or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems is has been extremely helpful to NYSDA as a standalone product in comparisons of various briefs and other mission critical documents.
askSam Systems - askSam freeform database software and application development consultation. NYSDA  has been using askSam for several years to facilitate in-house database development and access as well as for our Case Digest System which has over fifteen years of NYSDA's criminal case summaries taken from NYSDA’s newsletter, The Backup Center Report.
MapInfo Corporation - as their website states, "MapInfo is a global software company that integrates software, data and services to help customers realize greater value from location-based information and drive more insightful decisions. We help our customers in government and business meet a diverse set of needs - from asset management and network planning, to site selection, risk management and 'what's near me' mobile applications". MapInfo has gratiously donated a copy of it's flagship product, MapInfo Professional  as well MapInfo®Vertical Mapper™ and a suite of map data for New York State to assist NYSDA's ongoing grass roots campaign to organize Farm Workers and Native Americans in New York as well as our project to review statewide practices among both the judicial and public defenders/assigned counsel and their offices.
RARsoft - makers of WinRAR, a 32-bit Windows version of the RAR archiver - a powerful tool which allows you to create, manage and control almost any kind of archive file including RAR and ZIP. RAR format, in most cases, provides significantly better compression than ZIP, especially in solid mode. Another important feature of RAR is support of multi-volume archives which are more convenient and easier to use than so-called ZIP "span disks" archives.  WinRAR has been extremely useful to NYSDA in compressing files for archival purposes and for large email attachments. Because of its (in our opinion) more intuitive and logically designed user interface than other compression programs, and because it will compress/decompress ZIP files as well as almost any other type of compressed file, WinRAR is NYSDA's compression program of choice.
SSH Communications Security - an international company, leading supplier of security solutions and developer of SSH Secure Shell for Workstations andSSH Secure Shell for Servers among many other products.  SSH Secure Shell brings the transparent strong authentication and encryption to the desktops of the Windows and Unix systems, and enables secure terminal sessions and file transfers to and from the servers. It also enables the secured use of networked applications over untrusted networks. Since all communication between the two computers using SSH Secure Shell is strongly encrypted, NYSDA is using it for secure access to our Internet server. It has allowed us to disconnect "telnet" from the server. This is important because hackers frequently use "telnet" as a favorite means of attacking servers connected to the Internet. Using SSH virtually eliminates this risk.
Cheetah Websites Corporation - Cheetah makes very user friendly software for burning CDs and DVDs called Cheetah CD Burner and Cheetah DVD Burner, as well as a fast, simple, and best of all, free audio converter program (Cheetah Audio Converter). NYSDA has used several CD/DVD burning software packages with varying degrees of success, but has found Cheetah Burner to be superior in both user friendliness (simplicity) and reliability. The various problems we have experienced with other burners have been solved by installing and using Cheetah software. One of the great things about Cheetah is that the retail version is only $15 for the CD version and $25 for the DVD version (burns both CDs and DVDs), which is almost half of what the others cost. Very nice.
Past Sponsors:
AbirNet, Inc. - SessionWall-3 Internet/Intranet protection and monitoring software for security and auditing.
Adobe Systems, Inc. - Photoshop 3.0 software for graphics production.
Atomz - website search engine services.
Blue Sky Software Corp. - RoboHelp Windows "help" development software.
ClicksRight Computing - ECCO Pro training/consultation.
Corel Corp. - CD Creator software for CD-ROM production.
Cheyenne Software, Inc. - ARCServe and FAXserve network backup and network faxing software.
Clark Development Co., Inc. - PCBoard computer BBS software.
Edensoft - creators of PopUpCop™, popup blocker.
Group 42, Inc. - WebImage software for Web Page construction.
Helix Software Co. - Netroom memory management software.
JASC, Inc. - Paint Shop Pro software for Web Page construction.
Knozall Systems, Inc. - NLMAuto Pro network task agent software.
Kewlitt.com - Duplic8 , duplicate file finder utility.
Microtest, Inc. - Discport hardware device for network CD-ROM access.
NetObjects, Inc. - FUSION 2.0 professional web site development software.
Novastor Corporation - ThunderBYTE Anti-Virus Utilities software for network and workstation virus protection/security.
Novell, Inc. - Netware 3.11 network software.
Pitrinec Software - Macro Toolworks, Windows macro recording program.
QUALCOMM, Incorporated, Eudora Division - Eudora Pro 3.0 E-mail client software.
Software Shelf International, Inc - File Rescue 2.7, file recovery utility.
Sygate Technologies - Sygate Personal Firewall PRO software firewall for Windows.
Tetranet Software Incorporated - Tetranet Bot Suite (LinkBot, Wisebot, MetaBot) automated web site testing and maintenance suite for web site development and quality assurance; used extensively in NYSDA's website development.
Visualware - VisualRoute™, a traceroute program that analyzes connectivity problems and overlays all information on a World map.
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