Mostly, it’s because I’ve run out of things to say. On one hand, the technology issues I cover are well covered elsewhere. There are some amazingly good blogs out there focused on the use of Drupal and other open source tools. You don’t need to hear from me about the newest web tools – you have ReadWriteWeb and Mashable for that, among others.

On strictly NPTech topics, I can only say “nonprofits should use open source software for better sustainability,” “there’s more to talk about than social media,” and “all nonprofit software should have open APIs,” and “technology won’t save the world,”  and “the nptech world should develop open standards,” and “nonprofits should collaboratively develop software,” so many times. I know that this isn’t falling totally on deaf ears, but some days it does feel that way. And I’m kinda tired and bored of sounding like a broken record, so I will stop rotating now. And besides, the landscape has changed somewhat – in some ways better, in some ways worse.

I’ll still be building websites (and their successors) for the foreseeable future with Drupal, and perhaps with whichever cool, new open source development framework comes next after Drupal becomes irrelevant (it will, eventually). And I’ll be Google+ing (rather than Tweeting, which is mostly for my writing, or Facebooking, which is friends/family) interesting Tech and NPTech topics as they come along and are discussed. And when Google+ stops being relevant, I’ll find the next thing that comes along to share links and ideas and discuss. But for now, and until I change my mind (I like to keep my options open), this blog will be inactive.

Was this blog a success? I don’t know how to answer. Perhaps you can tell me in comments. For a good while, I had a lot of fun doing it. I hope I was at least a little helpful. Those are enough for me.

For the curious (well, OK, it was mostly me who was curious):

There are 409 posts and 922 comments. Since since September 2007 when I started to use analytics, there have been 151,000 ish unique page views, and 106,000ish unique visitors.  The most popular pages are (these are fascinating!):

1. The home page
2. LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org
3. CRM and CMS Integration: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge and NetCommunity
4.  WordPress vs. Drupal… Fight!
5. What is Cloud Computing?

This example uses an app from the Salesforce AppExchange, called “Salesforce for Facebook and Twitter.” To make things just a tad confusing, this is also called “Salesforce for Social Media” and “Salesforce for Twitter.”

There are likely many more options, but this is one I’ve seen that is pretty cool, although it has its weak spots. It definitely is geared more toward the “Service Cloud” than the “Sales Cloud.”

You can set up multiple twitter and facebook accounts, and each facebook account can have access to multiple pages. It’s all done via OAuth, which is cool. Once you set up the accounts, you can then grab conversations:

You can filter and sort, just like records in any other SF object. You can choose whether or not to send Twitter or Facebook identities to Leads, Contacts, or Person Accounts. You can choose to create cases from tweets or FB posts as well.

You can tweet or post to facebook directly from Salesforce:

And it works:

You can schedule tweets and facebook posts as well.

There is a lot more you can do – it’s a pretty cool tool. The one thing I can’t seem to find – and I don’t know whether this is in development, or they won’t ever do it – is import your social graph into salesforce – your facebook fans or your twitter followers. I’m not sure why this is, exactly. It seems a big gap to me. But then, it is the folks who engage with you who you definitely want to make sure to keep track of.

Anyway, if you are a user of either Salesforce, the Nonprofit Starter Pack, or Convio Common Ground, this is definitely a tool to know about.

As you know, I’m a bit of a technology curmudgeon, but I’m far from a luddite – I’m an early adopter, for the most part. I’m a fairly active user of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and some other social networking sites, and have been for years now. I certainly have followed and friended lots of organizations on these networks (particularly on Twitter, but also some more personally relevant to me on Facebook.) The apps I use most on my phone include the Facebook app for Android and Tweetdeck.

I spend some amount of my Drupal and WordPress development time, both for my clients and for myself, in setting up one or two-way integrations between websites and social media sites. I understand how the varied APIs work, and have to keep on top of whether I should be using a “like” or a “share” button for Facebook. I’ve been using social media to actively promote my new science fiction books.

In other words, I don’t avoid social media, I use it a lot, and I actively facilitate my clients use of social media integration with their web presence. (And I use hashtags in blog entries!)

But I’m still bored silly. Case in point: A new report out from IBM on Social CRM. It’s geared toward a for-profit audience, but it certainly has some reasonably useful lessons for nonprofits, and it has been a topic of conversation in the #nptech world today. But there isn’t anything in this report I haven’t read a dozen times already. It doesn’t help organizations bridge the huge data and workflow gap present between their traditional CRM/Donation management systems and their social media interactions. And if I hear the buzz phrase “game changer” one more time, I’m going to puke. It’s hype designed to sell things. And hype designed to sell things isn’t necessarily going to help make the world a better place.

No one should take this post personally. I’m very glad that most of my #socialmedia #nptech colleagues talk a lot about ROI of social media, and really try and figure out what works, and what doesn’t. But we’ve had, what 3 or 4 years solid of nonprofits using this stuff. Can it be demoted now?

So what do I want us to talk more about? How about lowering the costs of software by using open source and collaboratively developing software? How about data standards to help us share information more easily? How about finishing the work we did on getting the expensive CRM vendors to really open up their APIs so that organizations can better integrate their systems? Maybe talking how to deal with neglected nonprofit verticals like client management? Helping accidental techies get the training they need so that they can do more work in-house? Nonprofits who need tech help partnering with local organizations who provide training to the unemployed and ex-offender? The list goes on and on.

I’m going to focus here on the nonprofit sector, and options that are most common among nonprofits.

On the proprietary side, there are a number of options, and they fall into three categories:

1. Single-source proprietary custom CMS (from one web shop, or web host)
2. Proprietary CMS as part of a large package (such as from Convio or Blackbaud)
3. Proprietary stand-alone CMS (such as Sharepoint.)

You already know what I think about option 1, so I won’t belabor it here. Many people have found that option 2, using a large package, which includes donation pages, event management, etc. can be a really good option, and I certainly don’t want to say that this is not a good idea – I think it can be – but it also can be quite costly – and for many organizations, it’s overkill. And there are open source options that can do much of the same work for much less money.

There are not a lot of stand-alone proprietary CMS systems in nonprofits these days. Microsoft Sharepoint might be the most common I’ve heard of. Ektron is another one that I’ve heard folks talk about, as well as ExpressionEngine. The advantage of using Sharepoint for Microsoft-centric shops is that there is full integration with lots of internal network resources.

The open source options are many, but the big four: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone, stand out from the pack. As you know, I am pretty loyal to Drupal (and secondarily, WordPress) but I have to say that Joomla and Plone are solid, wonderful projects, with great communities, and active development, and will serve you well. Check out Idealware’s newish comparison of the four – it can help you figure out what’s best based on your needs.

Other open source options that I think are worth looking at include: Alfresco, which is heavy on the document management functionality and DotNetNuke, which is based on .NET, and somewhat popular among Windows users. Two up and comers I am very interested in following include Radiant and Refinery, both based on Ruby on Rails. There is also Django-CMS, written on top of the django framework (a python framework.)

If you’re really interested in open source CMS options, and looking not for data on features, but for data on popularity, marketing, community and such (a good idea if you are, for instance, a shop deciding what CMS systems to develop with and support) check out this report from Water and Stone (a digital marketing agency.)

I think on the whole, though, the number and richness of options on the open source side is quite a bit better than that on the proprietary side, and until I get an answer to this question, I can only guess that open source options have won over proprietary ones in the nonprofit sector.

At the moment, if you want to integrate Drupal and Salesforce, you have three options:

1. Use the contributed modules (or have a developer install and configure them for you).
2. Use Jackson River’s Springboard.
3. Roll your own (or have a developer roll your own for you.)

I’m going to talk in much detail about #1 in a bit. I’ve not had any experience with Springboard, but it’s important to understand that it is not open source, and is only maintained by one shop. That is going to be an inherent weakness – no matter what. I don’t know enough about it to match it to the contributed modules, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s possible for it to keep up, given the nature of open source development. All of that said, it’s supposed to be an interesting all-in-one sort of option, so it’s probably worth a look.

Rolling your own is always a precarious proposition. I frankly can’t imagine much of a situation where  it would be preferable to modifying what’s available and contributing the mods back.

So what is the status of the Drupal modules? Right now, there is an alpha release for Drupal 6, which is alpha in that very humble open source sense – it’s being used in quite a number of production sites. It includes some great stuff. You can see an overview here, in the slide deck for a talk given at NTC last week, which compares the integration of Salesforce with 3 of the big open source CMS platforms, Plone, Drupal, and Joomla.

There are four major projects:

• Salesforce Suite, which includes:
  • The API – the core module that does the communicating with the Salesforce API
  • Contrib – a module that provides support for import/export from contributed modules
  • Export Queue (experimental) for queuing exports
  • Import – importing data from SF
  • Match – for matching objects before creating new ones
  • Node – for linking Drupal nodes to SF objects
  • Notifications (experimental, sort of – it’s worked quite well for me) – allowing Drupal to handle SF outbound messages
  • User – matching users to SF objects
• Salesforce/Ubercart – provides integration for Ubercart. Uses the Salesforce Suite API
• Salesforce Feeds – allows for feeding SF records into Drupal via Feeds. Also uses the Salesforce Suite API
• Salesforce Webform – Allows for passing data from a Drupal Webform to Salesforce. Currently does not use the Salesforce Suite API, and cannot be used on the same site as the Salesforce Suite, but hopefully that will change soon.

All of these modules are actively maintained, there is an active base of folks using and contributing (including me) and there are plans afoot for Drupal 7, with big improvements. Of course, there are still some snaggy spots, and it helps if you know some about Salesforce to have this work really well, but I’ve gotten good results doing two-way sync of user and node data with the Salesforce Suite, as well as used the Salesforce Feeds module some.

If you use Salesforce, want integration, and are pondering a CMS choice, definitely check out the overview slides. If you are using Drupal, want integration, and considering a CRM, definitely consider Salesforce. And if you are already using both, and looking to find ways to integrate them, drop me a line, I can either directly help you, or point you in the direction of folks who can.

And, in my experience over the past 15 years, it’s where organizations are willing to spend the most money on technology – often more than on their website or other technology tools – for good reason. Because of this, the deck has always been stacked against open source tools in this arena. The sheer number of vendors providing this toolset for nonprofits is huge (although rapidly shrinking.) Two of them (Convio and Blackbaud) are even publicly traded companies, which says a lot about the profit potential of this vertical.

On the proprietary side, there is a wide range of available tools, from the relatively inexpensive, like Salesforce (web-based, including Convio Common Ground and the Nonprofit Starter Pack,) eTapestry (web-based, now owned by Blackbaud), Democracy in Action, and GiftWorks (desktop) to the egregiously expensive (you know which ones I mean.) Both NTEN and Idealware are the best sources for information about the range of options for this toolset – that’s out of scope for this post.

As you can tell, I’ve lumped SaaS tools like Salesforce, DIA and eTapestry in with proprietary in this post – that’s because that’s what they are – proprietary. However, Salesforce in particular has a leg up that most other proprietary tools don’t have, because of their open APIs and their incredibly robust development platform. That combination is impossible to beat if you need integration, ease of data movement, and a lot of customization. From my perspective, open data (via open APIs) can sometimes be more important to consider than whether or not a tool is open source – since integration with other tools, as well as using external tools of various sorts is critical. Closed data systems, difficult to integrate systems, or systems that require payment to get access to your data should be avoided at all cost.

On the open source side, there are a number options: you can choose an open source CRM package (designed for business), like SugarCRM, and use it or customize it for use in a nonprofit, use CiviCRM, or choose the desktop-based nonprofit CRM called MPX (built by a company called Orange Leap.) I’m excited about a new Drupal project called “Red Hen CRM” but it’s very fledgeling.

CiviCRM is a web-based open source nonprofit-focused CRM/Donation management tool. It’s been around for a while now, and is used by many organizations, some quite large (like the Wikimedia Foundation.) It is quite broad in its feature set – it has donation pages, event management, e-newsletter functionality, even a case-management system. I’ve installed, configured and administered CiviCRM many times, still work with it, and I have, like most developers, a love/hate relationship with it:

• I love that it’s open source/free software
• It’s got a great community of developers and users
• I love that it’s feature rich – you cannot find the whole set of things it does in any proprietary tool that I’ve seen.
• It is a tool that has unmatched cost-effectiveness for small organizations
• It’s great that it integrates with both Drupal and Joomla (although the Drupal integration is by far the most solid – and it is a very nice integration – hard to get with proprietary tools.)
• It is relatively easy to set up for most functionality

But …

• Data migration into CiviCRM is often nightmarish (this is really where the hate lies)
• Reporting tools are improving, but don’t match the proprietary versions
• It can sometimes be pretty tough to handle complex issues
• It can be tough to troubleshoot issues

MPX is a desktop tool, and although it is open source (GPLv3,) unlike CiviCRM, or SugarCRM, it is built on top of a proprietary stack (.Net/MS SQL Server.) It has primarily been used in faith-based organizations (that is Orange Leap’s primary client base.) But it’s a very full featured product, and quite mature.

So if you are a small organization that perhaps is still working with spreadsheets, CiviCRM is a great idea to check out. But in general, there are a lot choices and, sadly, few of them are open source.

I’ve been using this tool since it actually was StarOffice, more than 10 years ago, when it was first open sourced by Sun in 2000. For most of that time, except when I was doing heavy collaborative editing with colleagues who are using MS Office, it is my Office Suite of choice. There have been many times, over the course of the years, where there are things I’ve thrown at OpenOffice.org that it couln’t handle, but those things have diminished year by year, and over the past couple of years, I’ve had absolutely nothing to complain about (nor have I submitted any bugs, which I did a fair bit of in the early 2000′s.)

I would take a bet that 90% of people who use MS Office don’t need to pay for it, but can do fine with OOo/LO. 70% of people could pick up OOo/LO and use it with no training or help, even if they are used to MS Office. It is the only fully cross-platform office suite with pretty much the same functionality and interface independent of platform. It reads and writes all MS Office formats (except for Access files.) It does have a drawing program, an XML editor, as well as a math equation editor, in addition to the standard word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and database. Oh, and did I mention it’s free as in beer, too, instead of adding a couple of hundred bucks or more to the price of a new PC?

So what are it’s weaknesses?

• The spreadsheet doesn’t yet have all of the functionality of Excel. It’s pretty darned close, but even I have to admit that Excel is darned hard to beat.
• It doesn’t have The Ribbon I think most people would say this is a strength. :-)
• The presentation package isn’t quite as polished as PowerPoint, although you can do most of what you can do with PP.
• It doesn’t have Publisher
• The database has not come anywhere near the functionality of Access.

The days when many a nonprofit were run by Access databases is coming to a close as things move more and more to the cloud. Google docs will take a good long time to make it to the point where the functionality begins to match either MS Office or OOo/LO, so OOo/LO is a very good alternative to MS Office if you don’t need MS Access, and have folks able and willing to make a small adjustment to use this tool. I know that the fact that nonprofits can get MS Office for $30 or so makes a change unlikely, and I’ve carped about that one for years. But at least, for now, it seems that MS is still willing to be generous.

I’ll start with the bad. A mistake I see very often in RFPs is an imbalance in what is articulated in the RFP, and the kind of work that is required to pull off what’s needed. Let me give an example: An RFP for a new website has 2 pages describing in detail needs provided by any modern CMS (web based WYSIWYG editing, drop down menus, new pages easily added, contact forms, etc.) and then a phrase dropped in like “integration with our CRM,” or “event management system,” without any detail as to what these things really mean (like, what is the CRM and what kind of integration is needed, etc.) This invites a world of hurt, as you can imagine. Kind of like the sound made when the Man from Mars starts eating guitars in the Blondie song.

Then there is the ugly. The mistake that organizations most often make is that they have a five- or six-figure imagination, and a four-figure budget.

So what’s the good? What makes a good RFP?

• Do your homework: know what kinds of software options available to build the kind of system you want, and know what their capabilities are, and how much it generally costs to implement those basic capabilities. Learn about how hard customization of those platforms are (some are much easier than others.)
• Understand that integration of most any two different systems is going to be four times as hard as you think, cost at least three times as much, and will do 1/2 of what you expect or want.
• Hire a strategic consultant who really understands technology and the technological details of what you are looking for to help you figure out whether or not you can afford what you really want, and how best to articulate those needs in an RFP. Even an hour or two of their time will save you money and headaches. Someone who is a developer or who has been one in the past is a good bet.
• Read this slide deck by Gunner of Aspiration!!

(A caveat: I have more experience, especially with larger sites, in Drupal than in WordPress, so there are things that I may be missing. Feel free to make comments on what I got wrong.)

WordPress started out with a focus on ease of use for bloggers and content creators, and secondarily providing a platform for developers to build plug-ins and such. WordPress was born as a blogging tool, primarily, and has expanded outside of that realm, to encompass different kinds of content management use cases. Drupal started out primarily as a web content development platform, with a strength in community features. A focus on ease of use didn’t come about until Drupal 7.

At this point, both Drupal 7 and WordPress are pretty easy for end users to add and edit content, and do pretty simple administrative tasks (moderate comments, etc.) They both have a very nice array of canned themes available to use, and they both have some customizable themes (themes that make it easy to customize without needing to know much HTML or PHP – like Thesis) available. Getting a site up and running in both platforms is pretty easy, although neither are really ready for non-techies to take on. That said, most good webhosts have one-click installs of both CMS platforms.

WordPress still has only two content types: Blog Posts and Pages. You can’t have different kinds of pages, or different kinds of blog posts, or some other content type (news, events, etc.) that aren’t one or the other. That is a deal-breaker for many kinds of sites. There are plug-ins that allow you to create custom content types – I haven’t tried these, so I can’t comment, but it seems a big deal that this is core for Drupal, and an add-on for WordPress. And it seems that this, and the absence in WordPress of a way to easily control the way that lists of content are presented and viewed are the major platform differentiators. That said, many, many websites need neither of these features.

And if you want to get more deeply under the hood, both platforms require some understanding of the respective platforms (how plug-ins work in WP, how modules work in Drupal), and probably a bit of PHP, HTML, or AJAX to add bells and whistles to the theme. Given some big changes in the core of Drupal, such as adding fields to nodes, as well as image handling in core, some things are much easier dealt with in Drupal  7 than previous versions, getting close to the ease of use of WordPress in that regard.

Kinds of sites probably best done in WordPress:

• Blogs
• Community Blogs
• Simple brochureware websites

Kinds of sites best done in Drupal:

• Large community sites where you need different kinds of content generated by users (blogs, wikis, job postings, etc.)
• Complex, document-heavy library sites, or sites that need document management
• Sites where you want complex control over multiple content types – how they are created and viewed
• Magazine/Newspaper like sites where you want to control how lists of content are displayed and ordered
• eCommerce sites
• Sites with deep integrations to CRM platforms and web services

Kinds of sites where it’s a tossup:

• Medium or large websites with lots of content, but relatively simple organization
• Community blogs with many authors and identified, authenticated users

Bottom line: They are both such amazing, solid platforms, with rich, deep ecosystems of plug-in/module developers, implementors, designers, etc. that it’s hard to go wrong picking either platform, as long as you are clear on the feature set needed.  They have rock-solid core development teams, security updates, and over all good code, which you could hardly say about either platform 4 years ago.

Also, I have to say, as much as I have respect for other Open Source CMS platforms, IMHO, 98% of websites can be served by either of these platforms. That’s what’s true right at this moment. 3 or so years down the pike, I’m going to be looking at platforms based on Ruby on Rails – as Rails gets more mainstream, and solid CMS platforms start to mature, that will be the space to watch for. But that’s another blog entry, isn’t it?

First, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? The disadvantage is that primarily, Salesforce was not designed as a CMS – it was designed as a Salesforce automation and customer service tool. It has become a powerful platform, and there is a lot you can do with it – but it was never designed with content or visual design in mind.

What are the advantages? If you’re running database applications (tracking donations, events, programs, clients) and want deep integration between your web content and your data, it is an approach that is hard to beat. Certainly CMS/CRM integrations can go a long way – but ultimately, using Salesforce as your CMS platform will provide a kind of power that is not easily replicable using an integration. But with that power, may come some sacrifices.

What are the options for doing CMS-like things on the Force.com platform?

• The native capability of something called “Sites” – which is a publicly facing version of what’s called “VisualForce” – a markup language that includes HTML as well as APEX code (Force.com coding language). This requires a lot of custom code, and becomes unwieldy when you get to more than a few pages unless you write a mini-CMS yourself to handle things as a site gets more complex. But there is a lot there.
• CMSForce – This is an “open source” (in quotes because although you can get the source code, do what you’d like with it, and contribute to the project, because it’s written on a proprietary platform, it’s not really open source.) I’ve spent quite a bit of time with this one, and more to come, I’m sure – like any open source project, there is a lot that could be done to make it more usable. But it certainly is something to evaluate, and contribute to, if you find it useful. It is written by Force.com Labs, so it’s got serious Force.com developers behind it.
• OrchestraCMS – This is a paid app – with discounts for nonprofit organizations. I’ve taken just a test drive, but it’s pretty impressive – it has it’s own UI, and is well developed. There were a few hiccups in getting going, but I suspect it was because I only spent a little time with it. A partner we work with has done a lot of work with this application, and we’re pretty interested in it.

There are a couple of others, and I’m sure more in development. Salesforce has a rich enough data model and development platform to sustain a solid CMS – the big question is – is this the right fit in terms of integration? Salesforce-based content management is embryonic in comparison to CMS systems such as Drupal or Plone (or even WordPress for that matter) but being able to draw data directly in and out of salesforce very easily, for some organizations running Salesforce, might well be worth it.

And, it’s also possible to have one’s main site in a solid CMS, and instead of using complex integrations, have a mini-site with the same look and feel based in Salesforce, for the data needs you have. Again, it depends on what your use cases are, but that’s another way to go.