The Department of Justice signed off on Blackbaud's acquisition of Convio last week, and it looks like the deal will close this week. This is just the beginning of the story. I expect that it will take at least several months, and probably several years, before the dust settles and we … [Read more...]
The Limits of “Free” Software
I received an email newsletter today with the following pitch for a web-based donor database (perhaps you can guess which one): The Cloud offers you constituent relationship management (CRM) software that's less expensive, easier to maintain, more accessible, more intuitive, and with greater … [Read more...]
Twitter Hacking and Cloud Security
The front-page headlines read "Hacker steals Twitter's confidential documents," but the real story isn't about Twitter — it's that the stolen documents were stored online, "in the cloud." This could happen to any nonprofit or company storing data this way. As we've seen … [Read more...]
Pew Survey on Cloud Computing
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a study of Americans' use of "cloud computing," in which data and applications are stored online and are accessible via Web browsers. As more and more nonprofits move to using hosted customer-relationship management tools (CRMs) … [Read more...]
Best Practices for Hosted Data
The Pew survey on cloud computing reminded me of a discussion that Aspiration led in March, 2008. The topic was Best Practices for Hosted Data. The recommendations that emerged were: Know where all of your data lives (what Aspiration called "your data universe"). Keep this … [Read more...]