It is morning in the Manrique house, and I am sifting thru the August issue of PC Magazine, and low and behold I see an article that causes me to choke on my coffee.

On the page I see a screenshot of a web page from a site that I wrote a couple of years ago. It was an article titled "A Safety Net for Disaster Recovery" by Lisa Zyga. Lisa did a simple story on how there are web sites like ContactLovedOnes.org and others, but the interesting part to me was the coverage of Safe and Well by the Red Cross. As anyone who has read my blog knows that Safe and Well is the renamed KatrinaSafe site that we created the seven days following Katrina.

I love the fact that the site lives and continues to serve the Red Cross and public. I believe it is a part of my legacy while working at Microsoft and I remain proud of the work we did.

The only issue I had with the article is the lack of correlation with the larger feature set that we built. Lisa expounds on the virtues of an organization that addresses the problem of no web access during an emergency. Safe and Well, not only has an offline client that can run on any Windows machine to collect information (think a Red Cross worker on a laptop in the field) and sync the next time they have connectivity, but we implemented a speech component as well. We also saw the lack of connectivity an issue, but everyone could access a phone. When an evacuee and inquiry match occurred the site would dial a call to one or both parties if they selected phone as a contact type.

I am in no way complaining about the article, it was simple and not terribly in depth. A simple search would have connected Microsoft to the effort, but that was irrelevant to the article.

I think often that there is more that we can do to be proactive to create a global system that we can freely offer the world that has given us so much. One day, I think this is something I want to continue and champion...

Dan Manrique