Connections, The Airs Newsletter November/December 2014







The Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (AIRS) has released the latest issue of Connections, the AIRS newsletter. This issue covers such topics as 2015 AIRS Conference, choosing the right tools for I&R texting communications, and more. Read Connections by clicking the link.

Popular posts from this blog

5 Billion Data Field Exchanges A Month

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What have we learned?Moving so many fields of data every month has taught us a few things. The first is that the structure of your data matters a great deal, particularly if you need data exchanges to be quick and inexpensive. To do that--one needs to structure the data correctly in the first place.

Dry topic? Sorry. Here is a fun animation to make it more interesting. Caution: the music starts up in scene three, and you'll be humming the tune later today. It's less than three minutes long. Check it out here:

https://support.communityos.org/vl-video
More detail on Data PointsWe track the traffic across our APIs by "data points" which is simply one data field exchanged one time. If a record with 50 fields on it is called 100 times, that would be 5,000 data points.

The amount of transferred data also depends on the amount of data in the fields that are exchanged or queried. Some fields may only have a few characters or a simple "yes" or "no." Other fiel…
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CT State Infographic for Volunteering!

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The Connecticut State VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters), has created a great graphic to explain how the volunteer management solution works--with volunteers being able to sign up, register their skills and availabilities, and lead agency staff can then post volunteer needs, search for volunteers that can match the opportunities, and so forth. 

Visuals are always fantastic!  Visionlink is proud to provide this volunteer management solution and honored to help empower the time and talents of Connecticut's dedicated volunteers.




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New Password Standards

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None of us like passwords.Well, except for the good they do for us.

New research from NIST helps us to understand better ways to build passwords, and Visionlink has released an upgrade to its CommunityOS 2 platform in response.

The most fundamental change in the standards by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), is about the frequency of forcing password changes. Survey says? Never.

That's right: in common use, requirements to change passwords every 30 or 180 days, as examples, result in less secure passwords.

The second major change concerns a previous recommendation to mix letters and numbers. Gone. And again, this is because the complexity causes real-world users to use passwords that can be broken too easily, and also because automated password breakers can easily deal with something like "st0rmC1ouds."

Repeated patterns (aaabbbccc) and sequences of adjacent keys on keyboards (jklnm), and common passwords are further examples of what we all should av…
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