English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Research for our white paper proposal was minimal, as we basically worked with knowledge that our group already contained. After posting and receiving feedback on our proposal I can see that we really need to identify a single intended audience. Our other most important aspect is researching and explaining in a non-biased fashion the competing technologies that compete with SharePoint.

With the focus of our group's proposal a little off track, some of the research I've already conducted won't apply to our slightly shifted topic. The focus is now on the general IT needs of educational institutions (both small and large scale), and the white paper's decision focuses on what software solutions are viable and at what costs. Most schools today use closed source, commercial software, and have had great success, but others are finding value in open source and other free software. We want to present the case for both sides, and in several areas of software including operating systems, and word/office processing suites. The paper will be catered to the audience of school board directors; those who are in charge of decisions concerning IT funding. We want to educate this type reader on this topic, so IT costs can be controlled, while still offering powerful IT advantages to students and faculty.

What my group originally decided on was to do a white paper on was wireless network security. My research in the situation was going to be on WEP/WPA key protection. I believe that the type of research that I would most need is the technical data about how effective this key protection would be and how it compares to other variants of security. We are however changing course since the solution the wireless security could include all the options we were thinking and it was not a necessity to pick from our choices as a white paper usually implies.

This week was nothing but a brainstorming and building week. I started talking with other group members about what we are going to have to do for the weeks coming. When it comes down to what I did to benefit the group this week, there isn't much that can be said due to the fact that all that was needed to be finished up was to come up with a subject to base this project on. One of the things that i did this week was start up communications with Zephyrus to talk about what we needed to do to complete the tasks at hand.

This week was a tough one because we did not have much time to complete the proposal. I believe having a little more time would have been nice, but we are cutting it close here at the end of the semester. This week my group decided to split the project up into the four major documents due. Lindsay Petrovi did the bulk of the proposal. She did a well thought out rough draft. She posted it on Google Docs and then I gave feedback to what questions she still had about the proposal. Overall she did the bulk and my answers were small.

Date: April 5, 2009
To: J. Tirrell
From: Scott Stella, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

The blog post will summarize what has been done this week for the white paper project.

Date: April 5, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from March 30th to April 5th.

This week I played part in communicating our contact information with each other this week. Jack contacted everyone and we all replied with our email/phone/aim contact information. We all first agreed that we would rotate the job of our group activity report each week. Following this we started to formulate our topic. Once again all of this communication was through email.

Date: April 5, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Isaac Townsend, Group 1
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

This activity report accounts for the work and progress I have made from March 30th to April 5th.

I have not accomplished much of anything in regards to this group project. I sent an email out to the group on Tuesday to try and get some ideas going about a topic. Since I tend to be quite busy it is very helpful for me to get things organized as soon as possible so that I can plan around an conflicts.