Windows on the Web: Waiting for eNOAH

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

In Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” Godot never showed up. At nabe.com, we’ve been “Waiting for eNOAH”—and eNOAH has come.

It’s All About the Data

One of the most important tasks of any association is keeping track of its members. Some associations only need to keep track of contact information and the membership expiration date. Others are more complicated—keeping track of things such as preferences or event registrations. There are even more things to keep track of in NABE, such as roundtable memberships, specialty codes, industries, consultant’s registry descriptions, and speaker bureau listings, to name a few.

The last time NABE purchased association management software (sometime in the last century), the website itself was still a collection of 20 to 30 static pages. So there wasn’t much reason to worry about how well the stand-alone database, named NOAH, might interact with the website. Over the years, however, the website picked up more and more e-commerce and database features, which called for way too much manual translation between the two.

For instance, if you joined NABE, or registered for a meeting or teleconference and paid for it on NABE’s secure server, the financial information was sent to the credit card processing company. The non-financial information went to the NABE office, where it was copied and pasted or keyed into the database. When information was pulled out of the database so that it could go on the website, such as for passwords, member search, roundtable membership lists, etc, it came as Excel spreadsheets, which then had to be manipulated, reformatted, and converted either into tab-separated data or a MySQL database so that it could be recognized by the Web server. Needless to say, it wasn’t an efficient process in either direction.

What’s eNOAH?

About 18 months ago, we started the process of converting the membership database, NOAH, to the next generation, eNOAH. The old database was actually a Microsoft Access database that resided on the server in the NABE office, but eNOAH would reside on a Web server at the company that developed it, JL Systems. At one time, we thought it might be ready for the annual meeting in San Francisco, but like many software projects the debugging took longer than expected. However, eNOAH has finally arrived.

It’s actually being implemented one function at a time. The first thing you can do is register for the 2009 Washington Economic Policy Conference—well actually the first thing you can do is set up your new membership account on eNOAH. The reason you need a new account is that you will now have direct access to your membership information, and previous transactions, and it would be better not to use the easily guessed username and password from nabe.com. To establish the account you need your NABE membership ID number. In late November, the NABE office e-mailed your ID number to you, but if you deleted that e-mail contact the NABE office to get it again. While doing this new renewal is tedious, on the bright side you can select your own username and password, possibly the number one feature request for the website.

As we go forward, more and more membership and registration functions will be moved from nabe.com over to eNOAH.  There are also lots of new features we will be able to implement more easily, such as roundtable-only content, discussion boards, or blogs. We are working on making the interface between the old site and the new site as seamless as possible.

Twittering Away

NABE is still twittering away at http://twitter.com/business_econ. (See the October NABE News for more about Twitter.) If you are using Twitter and following NABE, please let us know, so that we can follow you, too.

And Finally…

Snow is falling outside as I write this, which means that thoughts automatically turn to…Fantasy Baseball! It’s never too early to start gathering possible participants for next year’s NABE Fantasy Baseball league. In 2008 we didn’t get enough players, although NABE did have a league in 2006 and 2007. This is not an expert league, and it’s free, so if you are interested, contact me in the next couple of months. League organization will take place during March of next year.