February 14, 2025 - This week’s notables

Have a wonderful week!

Upcoming Events

Mark your calendar and join us at Longview Farm for the following upcoming events! We're excited to welcome you—just make sure to set your GPS to 143 Cedar Ln. Glenmoore, PA 19343 (avoid Cedar Ridge Ln) for the best route straight to the fun!

📆 Saturday, February 22 – Save the date! We are hosting an Artist Talk with our current exhibiting artist, Hannah Zartman in collaboration with the Women’s and Gender Studies Collection! The Women’s and Gender Studies Collection is an online, always free, peer-reviewed, radically open-licensed resource available to everyone: students, teachers, community organizations, activists, and beyond. Hannah’s work is featured in the Women’s and Gender Studies Collection, and you can purchase some of it from the gallery!

📆 Saturday, March 1 - Save the date for our next Opening Reception in the Gallery! Raven George will exhibit her work from March 1 to April 26. Raven George is a conceptual artist from Trenton, NJ, who explores a range of styles, showcasing a mastery in oils and ink as her chosen medium. Drawing influence from the landscapes of her childhood, the intricacies of human experiences, and spirituality, the artist confronts tension within her process and transforms this into inspiration.

📆 Sundays, 12 to 3 p.m. – Join us at the Longview Gallery every Sunday to view and shop from our current exhibition, Toward a Tender Place, by Hannah Zartman. Check out what we have coming up in 2025!

IT Update:

We have a new color printer on its way!

It took only a day to get here, and it's already set up and ready for work. In addition to printing marketing materials, we can also offer high quality print services to our artist members or members of our community.

The printer is called Xerox VersaLink C415 and you can discover it and connect to it when you're connected our local network at the gallery! There will also be a way to print to it remotely, similar to how you can submit print jobs at Staples, by emailing your document to an address (stay tuned for details).

I'm happy that we can take advantage of this technology ourselves and offer it to our members as well!

Infrastructure & Support  

Our recent Information Radiation meeting underscored several pivotal initiatives and updates intended to enhance our operations and increase efficiency. A primary focus of the discussion was the customization of the Dynamics event portal for Longview Farm. We're concentrating on improving the visual appeal, sorting order of events, and incorporating event images. Unlike other portals in Dynamics, such as the inWorks LLC Support Portal, modifications to the event portal must be made by manually updating the page's code, requiring more time and expertise than initially expected.

We also covered the crucial role of change management in tracking modifications within customer environments. By utilizing Azure's change management features and Dynamics cases, we aim to bolster cybersecurity practices and maintain a solid change management process. This approach will help us effectively monitor and record changes, creating a comprehensive log for future reference.

We're also thrilled to announce inWorks LLC Office Hours. Starting February 26th, please join us for a weekly ‘Ask Us Anything’ session from 1 to 2 PM. Stay tuned for more details to come!

📢MICROSOFT FORMS USERS: Microsoft has introduced a new solution for synchronizing form responses to Excel, delivering improved reliability and performance. The old version will be phased out by January 13th, 2025. Upgrading to the new solution is essential to maintaining seamless data synchronization, ensuring compatibility with future updates and features, and benefiting from enhanced performance and reliability. Existing Excel workbooks will retain their current data but will not receive new responses unless updated.

Devices 

This week, we hit the road again for another equipment deployment–this time with the WatchGuard Firebox T85. Designed to support about 50 users, this is the biggest tabletop firewall WatchGuard offers. Though the office only has around 25 users, each person connects multiple devices to the network. We chose this model to plan for future growth and handle the current load of endpoints.

While our previous deployment went off without a hitch, we did run into some issues this time. Ultimately, we couldn't complete the Firebox setup and decided to return for a follow-up installation, aiming to avoid major disruptions. The office was offline for about an hour on a busy Tuesday before we restored the previous configuration. Fortunately, we had warned the client about potential downtime, but after the first setback, we opted to reschedule to keep the interruption minimal.

So, what exactly went wrong? Technically, nothing malfunctioned. The activation and set-up of the Firebox went as planned. Our stumble came with configuring reserved IP addresses and IP pools. Given the high number of devices in this bustling office, we had set up multiple IP address pools to meet the demand. This configuration took some time and effort, and during the process, our settings kept resetting, including the reserved IP addresses we initially configured. Though we eventually nailed the IP pool setup, we overlooked the need to re-check the reservations before deploying our changes.

Once we swapped the old firewall for the Firebox, none of the network users could get online. After some tense moments troubleshooting, we realized we hadn’t added the IP reservations back, causing network switches and printers to get reassigned IPs, thereby blocking traffic. To add to the chaos, we couldn’t access the Firebox’s configuration page to rectify the issue. We then started reverting to the previous configuration. Even after that, ongoing connection issues required a full restart of the ISP router, but we eventually got everything back in order.

To prevent further interruptions, we brought the Firebox back to our office for reconfiguration. We will complete the setup there so that our next trip will be a quick and seamless firewall swap.

Operations & Growth

This week, our team was thrilled to discuss various initiatives from inWorks LLC and Longview Farm. One of the main highlights was the vision for the Longview farm project, which includes conservation efforts and creating a food forest with native plants, herbs, and fruit trees. This project aims to maintain balanced plant communities and support wildlife habitats, with enthusiastic input from team members.

Another exciting initiative is the rebranding of art|Works Initiative. The goal is to develop new messaging and imagery that appeals to artists and micro businesses. This rebranding effort is necessary to reflect a broader focus beyond just arts and crafts, including micro businesses like electricians and plumbers. We are planning a meeting to discuss this initiative and are eager to make progress in 2025.

We are also revamping our marketing efforts for Smart Home Solutions. Recognizing the challenges in finding the right platform for promotion, we are considering involving team members in creating effective marketing strategies and materials. A meeting is scheduled for next Wednesday to further discuss the offering and develop a more concrete marketing plan.

Lastly, we had a lighthearted yet intriguing discussion about the possibility of adding a donkey to the farm. Although this idea started as a humorous suggestion, it has sparked genuine interest in exploring its feasibility and potential benefits. We are evaluating the necessary infrastructure and fencing, and our team is tasked with finding ways to make this project financially viable. If it’s not our own donkey, there is a partnership we are pursuing that would still require this planning, so the effort is warranted.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to work on these and other exciting initiatives to drive our company's success.

Information Radiation

Our recent Information Radiation meeting underscored several pivotal initiatives and updates intended to enhance our operations and increase efficiency. A primary focus of the discussion was the customization of the Dynamics event portal for Longview Farm. We're concentrating on improving the visual appeal, sorting order of events, and incorporating event images. Unlike other portals in Dynamics, such as the inWorks LLC Support Portal, modifications to the event portal must be made by manually updating the page's code, requiring more time and expertise than initially expected.

We also covered the crucial role of change management in tracking modifications within customer environments. By utilizing Azure's change management features and Dynamics cases, we aim to bolster cybersecurity practices and maintain a solid change management process. This approach will help us effectively monitor and record changes, creating a comprehensive log for future reference.

We're also thrilled to announce inWorks LLC Office Hours. Starting February 26th, please join us for a weekly ‘Ask Us Anything’ session from 1 to 2 PM. Stay tuned for more details to come!