Human processes mold around software. We see this all the time. A CRM gives you these 5 canned reports, and you get used to making do with what’s there. A legacy client database requires a certain order of data entry, and your intake forms have been produced to copy that order. Your email software has particular limitations, and you find behavioral workarounds.

What’s also true in the realm of customized software, is that software is molded around people. You put in your RFP that a package spit out data in X,Y and Z ways because your ED is used to data in that form (maybe because a package they had at their previous organization had those canned reports.) You have a requirement that data be entered into the system in one particular way, probably because that’s the way you’ve always done it. Sometimes, you feel the need to replicate a process that the person 3 administrative assistants ago put in place that was molded around their particular limitations, just because that’s what you know.

When you are undergoing the process of creating or implementing a new system of any sort, whether it be a CMS for a website, a CRM, some internal system, it is a really good exercise to be like a 3 year-old, and keep asking “why?” Why do we need this feature? Why will this report be important? Why should the software work this way? Once you peel the layers down to the bottom, you’ll either have “we don’t know” or “because we believe it will help us meet our mission in this specific way.”  Then you know what you should take, and what you can leave behind.

Yes, it might be surprising, but I got a friendly email from fellow NTEN Board Member Steve McLaughlin, who also happens to be head of all things internet (more formally, Director, Internet Solutions) at Blackbaud. He gave me a demo and overview of their NetCommunity tool, which has been around for a while, and I figured it deserved a blog entry. It is, in fact, a great example of integration of a CMS and a CRM. Originally, I wasn’t going to cover the one vendor solutions, like this because, I believed (and, honestly, I still do) that you’re not going to get as powerful a CMS as you can as the best-in-breed CMS tools. However, it is true that Raiser’s Edge, the CRM/DMS tool that this integrates with, is inarguably one of the most important tools out there. Some call it the gold-standard. For many other CRM/DMS vendors, it’s the red spot at the center of the dartboard in their office.

The demo was pretty cool. But you know me, I fall for shiny, especially when it comes to data. The integration between the web front end and the RE back end is bi-directional and sweet. There were a lot of things you could do, including accept donations, track personal donation pages, and the like. and a lot of different ways to track what your donors and constituents did, both online and off, and have those show up in really interesting ways. It is, in many ways, the kind of CRM/CMS integration that lots of organizations want and need. Organizations can get this package in three different ways: On premises – installed inside the firewall, hosted, or SaaS. Their SaaS offering is called “NC Grow”, which provides sets of fairly simple CMS templates to start with, designed for organizations that, in their words, “are ready to reap the benefits of richer online marketing and communications, but may not have the resources or expertise in place to make such a website come to life”

The big kicker, pretty much as always with Blackbaud, is the price tag. There is a $10K license fee that you have to pay if you use the On premise or hosted versions. Expect a $35-45K price tag for development and integration. Their SaaS offering, NC Grow has a $20K/year price tag. This all is, of course, above and beyond the megabucks you’re already paying for Rasier’s Edge.

I didn’t get a very close look at the CMS (I’m wishing in retrospect that I had), but the little bit I did see of it suggested to me that it was somewhat more limited than CMS systems such as Drupal or Plone. Even if, perchance, it’s not, you still don’t get the vibrant community of developers making cool modules and add-ons to do just about anything you can imagine – you’ll have to either wait for Blackbaud to do it, or, perhaps (I’m not even sure if this is possible, but correct me if I’m wrong in comments) have someone custom develop special custom features for you. And, you’ll have an automatic $10K price tag tacked on that you won’t pay with the open source tools. I have a hard time believing that that translates to $10K worth of feature value (one could argue it’s $10K worth of integration value, though, but I’m not sure about that.)

Bottom line: If you are an organization which has Raiser’s Edge, and is committed to keeping it, and you want to do sophisticated integration between it and a web front end, then NetCommunity is probably your best solution. But before you jump in, make sure that the CMS is going to have the sophistication and power you need. And know that because RE doesn’t have open APIs, you are unlikely to be able to create the kind of sophisticated integrations with a different CMS that NetCommunity provides with RE.

But, if you are not a RE user, or are considering migrating off of RE, I don’t think that the combination of RE and NC is especially cost-effective. You can get this level of integration with Drupal/CiviCRM for sure, and likely Plone/Salesforce, and Drupal/Salesforce (with a bit more work.) More on those later.

Open Source Tools

1. WordPress. I use WP pretty much everyday, between my own blogs, and helping clients maintain theirs. WP as a blogging tool rocks my world, and although I certainly could move blogging to Drupal, since I seem to be becoming somewhat of a Drupalista, it’s just not worth it. WP is clean and easy, and virtually hassle-free. There are lots of really great themes out there, and there just isn’t a reason I can find not to use it.

2. Drupal.  I’m somewhat of a latecomer to Drupal. Having been bogged down with my own open source CMS tool before 2005, then having taken a break from development, I missed out on the prime years of Drupal’s development. But now, here I am, and I’m impressed. It has become arguably the most popular open source CMS, and is a very able platform for creating all sorts of great web applications.

3. Xen. I use this everyday, although I don’t really interact with it much. I am administering and/or responsible for a couple of Virtual Private Servers that use it. Virtualization has really come into it’s own this year, and will continue to be a force to reckon with. I’m betting that in 2009, many folks will move from shared hosting to VPS servers. There are a lot of good reasons to consider this.

4. Songbird. Songbird is a brillant idea: build a music player using the Mozilla framework. Songbird was a buggy mess just a year ago, but with the recent release of 1.0, it’s absolutely an application to get to know.

5. CiviCRM. Oh what a difference a year or so makes. CiviCRM continues to mature, and is providing an interesting and important new model for nonprofit software development. It is becoming more popular, and is also highly recommended by those who use it. I’ve been getting to know it this year, and begun implementing it. I like it more and more.

6. Freemind. This is an awesome cross-platform mind mapping tool. I use it to create sitemaps, mostly, but it’s also great for brainstorming.

7. Elgg. Elgg is the open source social network management system. Install it on your own server, control your own data. Don’t use Ning, use Elgg. It finally looks like a project which will allow me to explore the strength of that platform is coming around the bend. Stay tuned.

8. MAMP. Wanna set up a easy development environment on your Macintosh without struggling with Fink or MacPorts? Use MAMP. Easy, fast, robust, and powerful.

Being a pragmatist, I do use proprietary tools, both the Software-as-a-Service, or basic desktop tool types. I use these tools because I haven’t found open source alternatives for these functions that work as well, or are as user friendly.

SaaS Tools

9. last.fm. I love last.fm. I love discovering new music, seeing what people I know are listening to, and learning more about what I listen to over time.

10. Twitter. This was the year for twitter. This was the year that nonprofits discovered twitter, and the year I integrated twitter into my workflow.

11. Evernote. I haven’t yet become an Evernote devotee, but I might. It’s an online note-saving service, with desktop and iPhone clients. It’s great to be able to take notes on my iPhone on the fly, and know they are saved, and will show up on my desktop when I want them. And it’s great to have my notes wherever I go, without bothering to sync my phone.

12. Intervals. Having tried a variety of project management and time tracking tools over the years, from the open source tools like ProjectPier (used to be ActiveCollab) and GnoTime (abysmal), as well as SaaS tools like BaseCamp, I have finally come across what is, for me, the perfect mix of project management, time tracking, and invoicing. It’s not cheap, but it works well, and saves me so much time invoicing, that it pays for itself several times over every month.

Proprietary Tools

13. Adobe Air, and applications. Adobe Air is an impressive framework for rich internet applications. I use TweetDeck, Twhirl, and the Analytics reporting suite among others.

14. Balsamiq. This Adobe Air application deserves its own entry. (I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while.) It’s a really great tool for creating very rapid mockups of sites that you are working on. It actually is good enough as a wireframe tool.

15. Coda. Panic software makes really good stuff. Coda is a great editor for developers. I like it better than Textmate, which I know is another popular editor for developers.

16. VMWare Fusion. Even being the semi-religious Mac and Linux desktop user that I am, every once in a while I am forced to use Windows. This makes it tolerable. There’s a nice full-screen view, if I want to really feel the pain. There is also a mode called “unity” which allows you to run a Windows application in a regular Mac window. It’s kinda cool.

So what tools did you come to depend on in 2008?