No matter where you are in your business or strategic planning efforts, technology will play a role in realizing your organization's goals.  Proper planning, budgeting and implementation of technology is essential for success. 
When Did Openness Become So Chic?

The year 2007 may well be remembered as the year of the "great opening": our software platform vendors are positively outdoing each other to demonstrate how well their systems will play with others. Software application providers in our CRM space have made one announcement after another to publish/ announce toolkits for programmers to integrate their products with other systems and to show demonstration projects to users.

It seems like just yesterday (or was it 2002?) when 52 community foundations formed a Technology Initiative to address the lack of such connectivity in our legacy back-office systems. In the words of the API committee of that Initiative:

"The greatest technical challenge facing complex organizations is not the purchase and deployment of new systems, but in managing the integration of the new with the old. Critical to this integration will be API’s that push workflow into internet interfaces". TSC API Bus Needs 9/3/2003"

The Atlas Data Bridge is on the brink of delivering on this promise. Because of the lack of existing tools it has taken four years, but the resulting system provides foundations with a data warehouse approach capable of inter-connecting multiple parties. The recent announcements mean that the connections to the parties just got easier. To see the latest status report on this project go here.

So who has been talking?

• Saleforce.com: (September 14, 2007) You may not know these people, but they are one of the leading CRM providers to industry, and have been pioneers in web technologies. They have set the bar for "openness", and so it is important to keep track of them.
  
  • Two years ago they literally wrote the book on how to write API’s, exposing their database to client programmers.
    
  • Last year, they created a directory for plug-in applications (some free, some not) so that customers could find the right third party providers and in a matter of a couple clicks install them.
    
  • This year, CEO Marc Benioff kicked off the Dreamforce 2007 conference in San Francisco by unveiling the particulars of Force.com, the on-demand application development platform the company believes will forever change the way companies develop, design, and access business software applications. (That means you not only interface to them, but use their platform to write your own application!).
    
  • For more information, see http://www.salesforce.com
    
• Kintera (July 10, 2007) announces Kintera Connect™, the company's open application integration platform that provides nonprofits with the freedom to select solutions to best meet their unique needs. Enabling the integration and extensibility of applications, the Kintera Connect software as a service (SaaS) platform will feature applications provided by Kintera and its application partner network, providing new solutions to the challenges organizations face and the freedom to innovate. A follow up on October 12 announced its availability for clients and partners to integrate directly with Kintera technology. See http://www.kinterainc.com/
  
• Blackbaud: (August 21, 2007) launches the Blackbaud Labs site to encourage interaction between its development team and clients. It includes launch of the Infinity API to be used for mashups and the Enterprise CRM initiative (web-based CRM). They may be late to the web-based software-as-a-service space, but given their dominance in the nonprofit sector they are contenders http://labs.blackbaud.com/
  
• Convio (October 16, 2007) announced the Convio Open Initiative, a combination of applications, integration tools, APIs (application programming interfaces) and partnerships to meet the nonprofit sector's growing need to tap the power of the new Web. http://ww.convio.com

Allan Benamer, of Socialmarkets.org and the NonProfitTechblog.org, has done a technical analysis of the offerings (see http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/convio-and-kintera-open-their-apis-but-befuddles-coders). In response to a question, he adds: "Kintera and Convio are not in market leader positions so they have to innovate. Kintera is definitely on the right track and I’m stunned that their API is so open."

And the Buzzword Award of the month goes to… SalesForce!

"Using Visualforce, a developer can create a user interface that looks like a proprietary application within a browser logic built into the tool. Salesforce.com's on-demand development components—database, workflow, infrastructure, apex code—all reside in the background. For Visualforce, Salesforce has essentially added its logic to basic Web building blocks, including HTML, Flex and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). What users are able to do is take a standard Salesforce user interface and tweak it to look like a stand-alone application." (SalesForce announcement, 9/14/2007)"

Doug Yeager
dyeager@givingnet.net