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Using GSuite in compliance with HIPAA

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. In short, it requires any organization that handles protected health information (PHI) to act as trustworthy and cyber-secure stewards of that data. Most often people associate this with doctors’ offices. You wouldn’t want your personal health records to be publicly available. Nor would you want your data sold to advertisers to monetize your most private data, likely without your knowledge.

Any organization that will collect or store PHI must be aware of the laws regarding HIPAA and ensure those systems for collection and storage are also HIPAA compliant. Enter GSuite, or Google Workplace, as it is most recently branded. It is fully capable of protecting data within its ecosystem, but your organization must first opt in for this type of protection.

This Google Help Article: HIPAA Compliance with Google Workspace and Cloud Identity has the most up to date information on how to enable these features in your instance. Essentially, you just need to check a box and and answer a couple of simple yes/no questions. Inside the Admin Console, navigate to Account > Account Settings > Legal and Compliance. There you will find Security and Privacy Additional Terms for Cloud Data Processing Addendum to Google Workspace or Cloud Identity Agreement. Review the appropriate clauses and if your organization fits and requires this additional layer of security, click Review and Accept.

Bitnami bncert-tool manual update to pull new certificates

Using free SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt is a great way to keep your site and your users secure. The only downside is that each certificate is only good for 90 days. Either you need to remember to renew your certificates every 90 days or you need to set up auto-renewal on your hosted server. If you’re using Bitnami packaged app for WordPress, then it’s easy! The bncert-tool will automatically check to see if your certificates are nearing expiration and automatically update them without needing anything from you.

… Until it does. This week I got notified by two different sites that their certificates were nearing the expiration date. That normally doesn’t happen because they’ll get renewed automatically well in advance. When I logged in to investigate, I saw that even manual attempts to renew the certificate were failing. The issue ended up being that I needed to upgrade my bncert-tool.

Bitnami bncert-tool References

Learn About The Bitnami HTTPS Configuration Tool is a great resource with everything you need to know about setting up bncert-tool. The command to upgrade is simple and takes only a few minutes to run and then you will be able to renew your SSL certificates.

sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool

If your tool is out of date, this command will inform you of that fact and ask if you would like to upgrade. Just hit ‘Y’ and Enter and the update will happen in the background in a matter of seconds. Once it is complete, you can run the same command a second time. This time it will walk you through the process to update your certificates.

I upgrade mine and my clients’ servers once per year. This is to get the latest Bitnami stack as well as the upgraded security features for each new revision of PHP. So this should be a rarity that an update of the tool is required in between annual server migrations. But just in case you’ve run for a long time without checking, be on the lookout for expiration notices and take action!

Confirm Nonprofit Status on PayPal

PayPal can be an easy and low cost way to power donations on your nonprofit’s website. Their layouts contain specific options for donation buttons. You can define set donation amounts, optionally include a custom amount, and have a checkbox for recurring monthly donations. They take care of the transaction, the cybersecurity (which is the biggest deal), and connect to your bank account, all for 2.9%+$0.30 per transaction.

But wait … you can get all of those same great features but at a reduced rate of 2.2%+$0.30 if you confirm your nonprofit status with PayPal.

Steps to confirm nonprofit status

1. First, make sure you have an active PayPal account. It will need to be a business account set up as a Charity.
2. Visit https://www.paypal.com/charities
3. Click on “Get Started”
4. Log in to your nonprofit’s PayPal account
5. You’ll be asked to provide identifying information like your charity’s EIN number, a recent bank statement, and account holder identity.

Once you are confirmed, you’ll enjoy lower fees on every transaction allowing each donation to have an even greater impact.

What is Cross Browser Testing?

Cross Browser Testing is a way of making sure your website is going to look great for all of your users. Just because everything is aligned and beautiful on your development PC, doesn’t guarantee that anyone who visits your website will see the same thing. Users will be on:

• Different Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari
• Different OS like Windows, Android or iOS
• Different versions of each browser (some really old)
• Different devices like PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones

If you neglect to test your website on any of those platforms, you run the risk of a sub-par experience for an entire subset of users. It can be a lot of extra work, especially when you find unsupported functions in a particular environment. But it is the hallmark of a well designed and robust website.

Several testing tools exist. My favorite one recently changed from a free tool to a paid subscription. So you may not get out of it for free. But you can definitely at least have a few different browsers installed on your personal PC and do some high level compatibility checks before deploying to production.

Or you could always go the lazy route and put a banner at the top that says, “This website is best experienced in Google Chrome.” (Don’t do that.)

Integrating Google Forms into your website

If you’ve ever tried to create your own web forms for data collection, you know that it can sometimes be a little arduous. Not only do you need to create the form, but you’ll also need an SMTP email server to relay the information from your site to your inbox. And once you’ve gotten the data, you need some way to transfer it to a database to make good use! That can be a tall order for a web newbie!

That’s where Google Forms can be a great solution to do the heavy lifting for you. Google Forms are easy to build, easy to edit, easy to integrate, and easy to collect and review data.

• To start, just head to https://docs.google.com/forms/ and log in using the account that will own the form.
• You can choose from some pre-built templates or start from scratch to build your own.
• Use the artists palette icon at the top to set some theme items – a logo of your organization at the top and your branded colors hex codes for the background and colors.
• Populate your questions. Be conscious of the fact that every piece of data you request is adding a little bit of friction to the users completing the form. Be thorough but not exhausting. If you’ve asked for data of birth, for example, there’s no need to ask for age also. Consider whether the questions should be multiple choice or multi-select and always consider adding an “Other” option.
• Preview and test the form yourself a few times to be sure the sequence and wording of the questions makes sense.
• Click the “Send” button at the top and choose the Embed option. Copy and paste the iframe code into your website’s HTML code.

• Lastly, head to the “Responses” tab, click the three dots in the upper right and click on “Get email notifications for new responses” to be notified any time someone fills out your form.

By letting Google Forms do all the work, you can focus on using the data instead of spending too much time figuring out how to collect it.