2019 SPE Awards and Scholarships Banquet

Hosted by: Board of Directors

Did you know that The SPE- GCS gives over $100,000 annually in scholarships? On May 23rd, 2019, the annual SPE-GCS Awards Banquet recognizes the high school seniors and college students who have received SPE-GCS, Communities in Schools – Houston, or SPE Auxiliary scholarships for the 2017-18 academic year. This is a fantastic opportunity to welcome outstanding students into the petroleum industry and to make a positive impression on members of the community.

Tendenci is proud to have partnered with SPE-GCS for the last 20 years and support their mission to remain at the forefront of technology, leading the way for other organizations in the industry.

Check out the event details here.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers – Gulf Coast Section Upgrades to the Latest Version of Tendenci to Support Their Growing Network

 The most active section of SPE International, SPE-GCS has recently upgraded to the latest version of Tendenci software, relying on the feature-rich Tendenci Association Management System (AMS) to deliver a dynamic, responsive online community that serves their members with timely information on events and webinars hosted by the organization.  

Read more about it here. Cheers!

The Society of Petroleum Engineers – Gulf-Coast Section (SPE-GCS) is an internationally recognized leader within the petroleum industry, providing extensive professional development, networking, and educational opportunities to the Houston and surrounding areas since 1935. 

Hungry for Knowledge – Cybersecurity

Hey New York! Please join LACC and Seth Rao from SecReliant on May 8, 2019 for this breakfast seminar on cybersecurity. Including an overview of the most common forms of cyber threats, the presentation will introduce preventive strategies on how to protect your business and data. 

With international companies such as Sony and Facebook being targeted by cyber attacks, customers see the safety of their data compromised on a global scale.

The Brooks Law Group Celebrates Rebranding with a Revamped Tendenci Website

Houston, TX — January 21, 2019

The Brooks Law Group, based in Houston, has offered its expertise in legal and attorney-client privileged consulting services to healthcare providers throughout the country for over 20 years.

As The Brooks Law Group went through the rebranding process last year, they relied on the feature-rich Tendenci Content Management System (CMS) to build a fresh modern look and an engaging interface that makes information readily accessible.

In addition to the fresh, mobile-responsive design, they are currently implementing Tendenci’s groups and newsletter mailing features to streamline the accessability to their legal and consulting services, as well as to disseminate information to individual subsets of clients.

We are proud to partner with The Brooks Law Group as they achieve their vision to provide aggressive representation and creative solutions for home healthcare and hospice providers throughout the country.

View The Brooks Law Group Site Live

Translations, Client iphone and Android Apps

A few cool things in the land of Tendenci clients and open source users internationally to share.

Client Created iPhone and Android Apps

Kudos to www.hapl.org and the developer Jaime Lossada who created this application for the iphone and android on top of Tendenci. This was completely the work of Jaime so if you have questions please reach out to him directly.

HAPL iPhone App by Jaime Lossada
HAPL iPhone and Android Apps by Jaime Lossada

We just think it’s cool to see what “Open” software enables people to do versus closed-old-world-options.

Translations

And we’ve had a few requests lately for translations via Transifex as well as new languages to add. Transifex it integrates with github and Open Source Projects like Tendenci.

Translations for Tendenci via Transifex
Translations for Tendenci via Transifex

You can check our our Transifex project for Tendenci. It’s crowd-sourced translations for open source projects.

data portals will be rolling out next week for T4 clients

FRIDAY UPDATE FROM THE CEO

To the T4 (Microsoft legacy sites) clients who are still running on limited functionality or no functionality for a few sites still. There is frustration and anger and I hear you loud and clear. We continue to work around the clock and reach out to trusted resources to help us in the rebuild. It just isn’t easy to take a web site up from Windows 2003 to Windows 2012 and reconfigure everything by hand to try to be sure the code it clean. Still, we have learned a lot so that we will be more prepared in the future and I’m extra committed to the migration to the open source Linux version. But what about RIGHT NOW?!

First – data portals are being configured with the sites that have been fully offline going up first.

https://github.com/epantry/django-sql-explorer
Django-SQL-Explorer attached to Replicated Databases

 

You will be notified through the helpdesk via tickets as soon as we have yours up. We may get a few up as soon as this weekend, and then the speed will pick up as we can clone it and modify the authentication information for each client. Thank you for using https://helpdesk.tendenci.com as it has been the only way I personally could jump in and help with tickets and track progress. I know the phone is more personal, but when the bullets are flying overhead it is efficiency we need, and I think we can all agree that it wasn’t efficient enough and things are still going too slow despite automation simply because of the volume.

There are a few other obvious items that we are still working through.

  1. Email notifications. With the changed IP addresses we are seeing some clients delivery rates drop significantly and need to update your DNS to send from an email address at your organization. This requires a site setting update on your site and your DNS provider to make DKIM and SPF record entries for email delivery. It’s tedious but has to be done. Spammers have made things complicated.
    Workaround – the system does record most notices as they are sent for administrators at /en/emails/search.asp on your site.
  2. File uploads – the new web application firewall is much tighter than before, and I know we have had numerous requests to re-enable things like Word Docs and Excel files, but both of those document types support macros in vbscript and are executables. Until we can put them in a read-only bucket for now the only solution is to convert documents to eliminate all spaces and use lowercase and make them PDFs. Why? Because URL encoding can be used to trick people and spaces aren’t as secure.
  3. Creating new pages and image edits. – Again this requires writing to the file system and we need to isolate every site further before this can be turned back on.
  4. Broken images and missing files – not all, but most of those, had embedded code in the images. Unfortunately this also strongly suggests that for the clients experiencing this the most, there is probably a virus on your home or work network and we strongly encourage you scan and analyze your computers. You can use Trend Micro’s HouseCall for a free virus scan.
  5. SITES THAT ARE STILL DOWN – we have NOT forgotten about you. This remains my top priority for the team and is being done either by a different group of people (I’m leading the charge on the few sites still offline personally) or it takes precedence over the items listed above.

To our Tendenci 5 clients, and the sales contact forms, and clients used to a higher level of service who are feeling, and sometimes are, being ignored by our team. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s simply the result of clients who are victims of the hack attack and they have to be our priority.

And lastly, as difficult as this time has been for all of us, because it was a crime and crimes are not victimless, I appreciate the patience of some, I understand the anger and frustration of others, but please know that we will get through this. Even the clients who left, we’re still going to restore your data so you can get it.

I’m hugely grateful to our team for handling the front lines so the technical people like me could focus on solutions instead of discussing them, which ultimately is what everyone wants. This whole thing saddens me and I can’t apologize enough, while at the same time it infuriates me that it happened in the first place.

 

network outages at several data centers

At Tendenci we are aware of network outages at several data centers. They are being worked on. We are aware of it. We are working on it. Please be patient.

The image below is the world we live in and we are defending our network against it. Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t holidays around here – they are battle zones unfortunately.

We understand how critical your infrastructure is to you and take it very seriously. This is the world we live in now. (read more after the jump)

IP Viking Network Attacks Map
IP Viking Network Attacks Map

All of our technical people are working on bringing the clients on Tendenci 4 back online and not taking phone calls or emails as the issues are known. Some require moving large amounts of data which takes time. To not make backups prior to moving servers isn’t acceptable either.

The solution is, unfortunately, we will need to further bulk up load balancers and the already double and triple firewall, WAF (web application firewalls), virus scanners.

Step 1 is to get everything back up.

http://map.ipviking.com/

Ring, Ring. Tendenci is Switching Phone Systems!

Tendenci community!

We are making the jump – phone system in the cloud.

Our new phone system is more dynamic and mobile.  We also love to hear your voices and this system will allow for clearer transmissions.

We’ll be switching over phone systems this weekend.

If you have any trouble reaching us this weekend or early next week, please send us an email at support@tendenci.com

 

 

Have suggestions for new modules?
Have questions on setup?

Check out our new community forum: http://community.tendenci.com/

Connect with Team Tendenci and the Tendenci community.

 

 

Photos “A Celebration of Entrepreneurs” Gala, Honoring Raymond Plank

Houston Technology Center's Annual Gala

Houston Technology Center's Annual Gala
HTC’s – A Celebration of Entrepreneurs Gala, Honoring Raymond Plank

Photos from a recent client event – “A Celebration of Entrepreneurs” Gala, Honoring Raymond Plank by the Houston Technology Center.

I was honored to be one of the recognized Entrepreneurs although definitely not in the same league as the people crossing the podium!

While I always joke that I live on an airplane, Houston is home. So it is still such an honor for me to know that to know our Open Source Software serves clients like the HTC and learn firsthand just how amazingly funny but determined a man like Raymond Plank is.

 

And this last week I got to see an inspiring and truly amazing personal friend of mine speak. None other than Grace Rodriguez who now works with TED. She spoke at one of our other client’s luncheon this month, the American Advertising Federation of Houston. A few of those photos are on the Tendenci AMS site as well and cross posted to the AAF-Houston site. I am a former board member and have been involved in AAF Houston for years.

Grace Rodriguez photo gallery
Grace Rodriguez Speaking at AAF Houston

The best part about attending client events, well there are several really, but they include things like:

  1. Attending a client event – It’s a chance to say thank you to our client! With over 300+ that we host it gets harder and harder to say thank you as I don’t know many of you personally. A while back we added up a count of users logging in different Tendenci sites just in our data centers (we have three). Just the totals of course with no identifying data, and it was over 1.2 million souls. It makes me proud and also nervous when we tweak the Tendenci user interface!
  2. Attending a client event – I listen and YOU tell us how to improve what is both yours and our product! Yes, Tendenci is fully open source and you can download it from github at https://github.com/tendenci. So there may not be a direct financial benefit. Yet that is truly OK as Tendenci is clearly not just about the money. And a lot of y’all do host with us.  We appreciate both the developers who use and tell us how to improve and the clients we host and manage everything for them.

Speaking of feedback – be sure to tell us how to improve the software on our new community discussion forum at http://community.tendenci.com. We talk to a lot of developers on github so the forum is more for…. you know… humans who use the software day to day. What are your needs? What would you like to see in Tendenci?

What is your priority on our Roadmap for example?

I’ll do another blog post about the Tendenci community forums soon. (This also means that we now have forums integrated with Tendenci. We found another great Django based open source project named Misago which works great with Tendenci given we also use Django. Next is the single-sign-on server process….

Onward! And have a great Friday y’all!

Ed