Are you a SQL Server DBA, Developer, Report Writer?
Do you align with a desire to spread God’s Word?
Do you love working in an evolving/energetic environment?

Yes? Well here’s  a neat opportunity.  The Seed Company is a Christian non-profit focused on Bible Translation. Based in Arlington, Texas in the heart of the D/FW metroplex they are seeking a multi-talented individual to fill a big need.

“The Seed Company is a faith-based, 501(c)3 organization committed to the vision of creatively networking God’s people around the world to translate the Bible into every language for His glory”

Here’s the info on the position.

Brief Description: Preserve and extend TSC staff capabilities through database development, administration, and reporting.

Responsibilities:

General:

1. Has servant heart, and a desire to make others more effective in their work.
2. Good interpersonal skills.
3. Strong written and verbal communication skills.
4. Ability to understand user needs and to design database solutions appropriate to those needs.
5. Familiarity with computer networking and security issues.
6. Familiarity with server administration and backup/restore techniques.
7. Ability to document routine tasks.
8. Working knowledge of Microsoft Access, Windows Server and Microsoft Office products.
9. Working knowledge of web technologies.

Specific:

1. Ability to develop and maintain data dictionaries and data models/ schemas.
2. Ability to design and maintain reports and reporting environments.
3. Ability to design and implement user interfaces for data entry and reporting.
4. Ability to design and maintain integration (ETL, SSIS) with other database systems.
5. Knowledge of tools for database design, performance monitoring and user interface development.
6. Thorough understanding of SQL Server and reporting tools.

The position is full-time and will be out of the Arlington, Texas office. There are a number of neat initiatives going on including moving to an SSRS reporting environment (SSRS 2008), the potential to start into Data Warehousing, data integration and automation with a number of internal and external information systems.

Interested parties should contact:

Dave Mutchler
dave_mutchler@tsco.org
(817)-557-2121

Corporate Headquarters

The Seed Company
3030 Matlock Rd. Suite 104
Arlington TX 76015
USA
view map
Phone (817) 557-2121
Toll Free (877)593-7333

Contact Info: Email resumes with cover letter to: dave_mutchler@tsco.org

Business Type: Bible Translation

Comments: The Seed Company is an affiliate of Wycliffe Bible Translators and seeks to make employment decisions in accordance with applicable federal and state employment discrimination laws and regulations. As a religious organization, The Seed Company is entitled to make employment decisions on the basis of religious beliefs and practices of the applicant or employee. All positions require a personal commitment to Christ, evidenced by personal testimony and identification with a local church.

12 Standard Screen Patterns – An interesting article from DesigningWebInterfaces.com. These patterns are specifically discussed in relation to the adoption of RIA platforms.

How To Get 1,645 Free Prints – I won’t even pretend to call this an article but it is a quick set of links to photo print online services that offer free prints to new customers. Read each services fine print for the free prints but hey, you can get some free prints without using your ink.

Google’s Next-Gen of Sneakernet – Old is new again. Even with all of the significant progress and exponential growth of computing power, network bandwidth, et al. The best way to deliver such significantly large amounts of data is via SneakerNet, er FedExNet.

Ebooks search engine – Interesting site where your search results are PDF documents only. Did find quite a few duplicates in my test search results, but also found some interesting Drupal PDF docs.

MySQL Cheat Sheets – Thumbnailed list of links to MySQL Cheat sheets.

Until next time, grace and peace to you.

Today I want highlight one of my favorite podcast sites recently, Geeks and God. This site is run by Bob Christenson (Rob Feature) and Matt Farina. Both profess “I am a Geek, I Love God.” Hey, two things I’m right with them on. Bob (Rob) is the artsy/designer type of the duo.  I enjoy listening to his podcasts as he has a great little edge to him and his presentation. Matt is the engineering/uber geek “other half”. Between the two of them, the site feeds both sides of the house in an upb eat, edgy way. Or to put it another way, these guys rock!

But to say Geeks and God is only a podcast site would be an understatement. The site is a resource with video tutorials and links, a community with user signups, profiles, forums and user submitted resources. Finally, Geeks and God is a mission.

“We want to encourage Christians to embrace the amazing tools that have been developed over the years and put them to use in unique and innovative ways: All for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In this community we seek to inspire, question, wrestle with, and brainstorm about how we can use technology in the church.” – Geeks and God website

The topics covered vary widely. Anything from creating a WordPress theme, to ensuring techie/non-techie communications to building online communities. Rob and Matt even have a series on how they built another site in Drupal. The transparency is loved. Heck, want to know how there newly re-launched Geeks and God website was created, listen to episode 102.

Certainly, there has to be another reason I like these guys and the site, right? Of course there is. The site is built on Drupal! Nevermind the fact that you can catch some tips and tricks for Drupal from some of the video podcasts. See, we are loyal Druplers too. Did I already mention Drupal?  Of course they have Joomla and WordPress forums as well. (Sounds a lot like Tech4Him)

So, go check these guys out, join the community and gain some knowledge while having good clean fun.  Oh, be sure you don’t try to get anywhere on the site you shouldn’t without logging in or you’ll be met by the “bouncer”… wait, doesn’t that look a bit like Matt?

Blessings guys!

The use case is that this organization has staff all over the world. Many of whom are in the US with broadband connectivity. Another significant number of folks are in remote regions of the world where continuous electricity is a luxury, not an everyday reality, let alone high speed internet service. Yet, the staff still have monthly reports, for example, that need to be completed, emailed to an individual in the US, and then that data is then re-keyed into back-end systems. Just to email these reports, some staff may have to travel a couple of hours to get to an internet cafe to send the emails. Yikes!

So…this got me thinking. If we cannot effect improvements to remote infrastructure, what about improving the other pieces of the process. This lead to the thought of providing forms that staff can complete when they are offline, store them and then when they are connected, they can click a button or automatically submit then. The difference here is that those forms then are submitted to a web service that imports the form data into a workflow and eventually into the backend data systems, all “auto-magically”.

Given some of my background, I immediately began thinking about Microsoft’s InfoPath, MOSS 2007 and BizTalk Server. While this might do what we need, the initial cost AND ongoing soft costs may be more than this non-profit can handle. So, to Google I have gone to try and see what other options are available.

Below are links to some potential options that have been found and will require more research. I am posting this now though in hopes that you might have some experience, ideas or solutions you would be will to share by commenting below.

How about open source? (most all of you know we are big open source proponents)

Many thanks and blessings to you in advance.

* Quask – Form Artist product in combination with their workflow and business process automation offerings. No idea of costs available.
* Cardiff LiquidOffice
* ProcessMaker – Open source workflow
* Bonita Workflow – Open Source