JumpBox Official Blog

Surveys can be a great way to mine valuable insight from your customers and potential customers. With surveys you can:

• Prioritize features on forthcoming revisions of your product.
• Discover unmet needs and match the language of your users for better conveying your value proposition.
• Connect with your users more deeply and solicit their feedback so they know you take their input seriously.
• Validate your hypotheses about your business before engaging expensive resources.

Every organization stands to benefit from having better insight from querying their stakeholders. There are many great SaaS-based options available but the trouble is that they bill monthly for a service which you may only need a few days per month.

Here is a technique you can use that gives you an easy and affordable way to conduct surveys in which you pay only for the days that you’re running them. It requires a small time investment up front to learn how to launch an instance on Cloud Gear but once you know the technique you can use it not just for surveys but any of the other tools in the JumpBox library. Here’s how it works:

1. Launch a LimeSurvey instance on Cloud Gear. If it’s your first time with that service you can signup here for free and watch a brief intro video to get an orientation.
2. Next you’ll want to watch the Ramp Up video for LimeSurvey to get the fundamentals of the application for conducting your first survey.
3. Now you’ll author the survey, publish it and invite your participants. At the conclusion of your survey analyze your results online and export them to excel so you have an archived copy.
4. As a last step it’s a good idea to use the JumpBox backup mechanism to download the state of your JumpBox. This way you can always spin up a new instance later and inject your data back into it or download the JumpBox and run further analyses offline.

The monthly services tend to have slightly more-polished user interfaces but this technique is great if you:

• have concerns about privacy of your data
• are in cost-cutting mode and looking for ways to trim IT expenditures
• need custom functionality or design in your survey tool

This is just another post in a series of ideas to help you save precious IT dollars during lean times.

If you’re pinching pennies like most people right now and you currently use one of the SaaS virtual meeting services, you can realize substantial savings on your monthly IT costs using this technique. Here’s how it works:

1. Launch an instance of Dimdim using Cloud Gear. If you’re not already signed up for that service, it’s free to join. You’ll find enrollment instructions and a “getting started” video here.
2. Once you have your instance running it’s just a matter of starting a meeting and inviting participants. There’s a brief Ramp Up video here that teaches you the basics for running your first meeting. If you’re running a pre-scheduled webinar and need to invite participants ahead of time as long as you have access to a URL that you can redirect, you can give them that address and then update it to your meeting URL once the meeting is launched.
3. When your meeting is concluded simply turn off your Cloud Gear instance.

If you run a 2-hour meeting using this method it costs you roughly $.50. If you normally conduct only four meetings a month you’re paying $2 vs. the $40-$200 you’d pay for having a mainstream SaaS conferencing service. You’re also avoiding any obligation in terms of committing to a contract with a SaaS provider.

This is just one more way you can put the power of JumpBox and the cloud to work for your organization. Stay tuned for more techniques like this one to help you reclaim time and money during these lean times.

Omeka is a content management system specially designed for people who need to host a collection of digital objects. Museums, libraries and schools will find this JumpBox particularly useful as it yields a comprehensive, standards-compliant set of metadata for each item. The notable features of this system include:

• Easily skinnable: Change the look of your site with ease by installing themes.
• Extensible via plugins: Add new functionality like an exhibit wizard or a bulk uploader via the plugin system. Or write your own and contribute it to the Omeka community.
• Tiered access permissions: Assign varying levels of access to people based on what they need to see and do. Designate someone as a curator of a certain collection.
• Output formats: Make your collections discoverable and re-mixable by exposing items in JSON, RSS, XML and ATOM formats.

In this video we’ll cover the bare essentials of getting started with Omeka to make your first collection. Enjoy!

Launch this JumpBox on Cloud Gear

Follow along with the tutorial using only your browser.

*Tip: To view video at full-resolution in hi-def, make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the screen.

Do you need to create a dynamic web site that can be maintained by multiple people in your organization? Joomla is an extremely popular Open Source content management system and is known for its intuitiveness and simplicity. It’s noteworthy features include:

• Thousands of themes and extensions: Joomla has a vibrant ecosystem of theme and plugin developers who extend the functionality of the software to do just about anything imaginable.
• Intuitive editing of content: The “edit in place” style of content management is intuitive and means that even the most non-technical folks in your organization can maintain their own web pages. This translates to less burden on IT, more real-time and accurate content with fewer errors.
• Tiered access permissions: Users can be granted varying levels of permissions to give them only the access they need. They can be merely registered to receive email, able to submit new content, able to edit existing content and able to publish content to the live site.
• Highly configurable: The system is highly customizable via the web based administration console. Page caching, search engine friendly URLs and page metadata can all be easily adjusted without having to wade through readme’s and .ini files.

In this video we’ll cover the fundamentals of working with Joomla to build a web site. Enjoy!

*Tip: To view video at full-resolution in hi-def, make sure the button is on and click the button to expand the screen.