Are you debating whether to adopt Linux or open-source software at your organization, but can't figure out how to get started? The NonProfit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) created this guide to help nonprofits make an informed decision about whether to make the switch.

Here, NOSI outlines six steps you can take to begin to put open-source software to work in your organization, and in the process learn more about it, its capabilities, and its cost-effectiveness.

As more and more organizations jump on the social networking bandwagon, people are seeking ways to make the time spent on these tools as efficient and fruitful as possible.

Organizations, libraries, and schools running public computer labs face a variety of complex computer security challenges. Not only must these institutions take steps to ensure the physical safety of their hardware, they must also take into account desktop integrity and security.

It can be hard enough to trust your own staff with computer equipment, let alone the general public. Yet for some nonprofits and libraries, any computer is a shared computer, with staff using equipment by day to work and constituents using it in the evenings for training, educational, or even recreational purposes.

As an IT manager or accidental techie, you have two main strategies for fighting spam. First, educate yourself and your colleagues about how spam works. Second, you can use technology to battle spam. The rest of this article will focus on anti-spam technologies, also known as spam filters.

Hiring at its worst inspires both boredom and anxiety. Wading through resumes bores us, and the thought of hiring the wrong person scares us. And the fear factor is worse when you’re a non-techie who’s been tasked with hiring IT staff. As with any complicated, difficult decision, success starts with good planning.

IT Standardization is a strategy for minimizing IT costs within an organization by keeping hardware and software as consistent as possible and reducing the number of tools you have that address the same basic need.

When someone refers to a server, what are they talking about? Put most simply, a server is a piece of software or hardware that provides resources to one or more computers on a network. The word “server” causes some confusion because it’s used as a catch-all term for several distinct things.

In a peer-to-peer network there are no dedicated servers or hierarchy among the computers. All of the computers on the network handle security and administration for themselves.

In the simplest terms, a network consists of two or more computers that are connected together to share information. All networking, no matter how complex, builds off this simple system. Though this may seem like a basic idea, the concept was a major achievement in communications.