A few little dishes for the weekend:

As of yesterday, Google is offering nonprofits Google Apps Education Edition for free. This turns the world upside down for nonprofit system administrators. I’ve changed the Leaderboard to reflect my new recommendation for enterprise e-mail services for small nonprofits. Yup, Gmail for Domains is the ultimate Exchange killer for nonprofits. Microsoft can’t keep its hold on enterprise e-mail forever and Gmail is going to loosen that grip. I use it, I live by it, I swear by it, it’s time to migrate. And speaking of migration, check out Ltech Consulting. They’re hoping to help you with that migration.

What’s the ROI for larger orgs with lots of e-mail? Add the cost of the Exchange server plus file backups plus the cost of administration (licenses and administrator time) and your anti-spam software (and the cost of administering that!). If that cost over three years is greater than the Ltech Consulting migration plus some extra bandwidth to handle the possible load of getting your e-mail over the Web, I would seriously consider it. Frankly, the cost of extra bandwidth is always dropping. Of course, those of you heavily involved in using all the little gewgaws of Office (public folders, shared calendars and the like) may want to do some extra review but after having had to use Outlook for years, I have to say I greatly prefer Gmail in terms of user experience and accessibility. Believe it or not, it’s easier to make it sync with Windows Mobile devices in some respects but it doesn’t have the cool direct push capability of Exchange but that’s not a real showstopper in my book.

I have a suspicion that NTEN had something do with this as the announcement was made during the NTEN mixer at Google. If NTEN even had a tiny role to play, I still have to give a lot of credit to NTEN for pulling it off. Kudos to Katrin and Holly!

Kintera picked up 28 votes on 7/13 in the CRM poll. That’s a huge number for one day. Someone really tried to spam the poll — 85 visits in one day??? Add that to Kintera’s stock growth in the last month (something like 30%) and the constant chatter on Yahoo! Finance about KNTA and I can’t tell whether it’s enthusiasm or cynical manipulation (or both).

Also, we hit 4,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days. Thanks to all the people who’ve always been around and welcome to all the new visitors too! This week has been the most heavily trafficked so far for the Non-Profit Tech Blog. Yay!

Oops! One last thing — I’m going to be in Boston next Tuesday. If you’re around, e-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org. I love to meet readers (all 4,000 of you!)

So during the hottest part of the heat wave in New York City last week, in my room, with its lack of an A/C, I listened to Shaun Sullivan, Blackbaud’s CTO, outline his plan of attack for the next year. This interview is in two parts because Mr. Sullivan just blasted me with a firehose of details and information, all of it juicy and too long to present in one blog posting. Suffice it to say, that you could sense that Blackbaud was gearing up to really cement their hold on their current customers and prevent any future inroads from salesforce.com. And as I was sweating profusely wishing that I had bought a fan, he stressed that all the technology he was talking about that day with the exception of “Scorpio” was actually shipping software but only to a select client list.

Let’s get some issues straightened out because Blackbaud’s recent spate of press releases have left myself and a lot of other Blackbaud users quite mystified. Mr. Sullivan was kind enough to give me a run-down on Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing.

• Blackbaud Enterprise CRM is what was called “Galileo”. It is NOT Raiser’s Edge 8 but it is Infinity. It is dedicated to high-end fundraising and definitely not the shrinkwrapped version that we’ll see when Infinity is finally released to us mere mortals. This launched in Q1 of 2007.
• Blackbaud Direct Marketing is what was called “Bullseye”, also built on Infinity. It is dedicated to high-end marketing and list acquisition and was released in Q1 of 2007.

Now get this, Raiser’s Edge 8 is NOT the Infinity platform. Raiser’s Edge 8 is the mass-market version (as mass-market as Raiser’s Edge can get I guess) of the Infinity platform. I guess, for all intents and purposes, you, dear reader, and I will never see Infinity unless you’re a high-end client. That is, if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a very good chance you won’t see it at all.

But let’s talk about what Mr. Sullivan has dubbed “Scorpio”. It is Blackbaud’s on-demand platform that combines Blackbaud’s NetCommunity and a CRM. It will be written in .NET 3.0, rely on open standards, focus on extensibility and integration, highly secure, and it will be built so that IT Operations people won’t tear their hair out trying to maintain it.

Scorpio is using .NET’s standard hooks for a rich internet application (RIA) so the new Raiser’s Edge 8 is pretty much a Web application that also serves as a thin client. We might even see a Silverlight version of Scorpio come to light since Silverlight may get wrapped into .NET fairly soon. And Scorpio runs on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server Report Services 2005.

However, you’ll be given a choice between using the on-demand version of Scorpio, hosting it yourself, or asking a third-party vendor to host it for you. That’s right, Blackbaud is trying to open up the Raiser’s Edge market for ISVs so that they can actually make a bit of money hosting Blackbaud applications. Unfortunately, a lot of the details that would outline how a future relationship between an ISV and Blackbaud will be are still to be worked out. They know they have to focus on helping their future ISV partners make money but they have yet to figure out what direction they need to take.

The self-hosted and third-party hosted versions are more like the traditional Raiser’s Edge 7 that we’re seeing now but just more hefty, featuring things like Active Directory integration. The on-demand version will not have AD integration.

However, if you’re just using the web services API that will be built into Scorpio you won’t have to pay to code for it, but any under-the-hood APIs will need an upfront payment to access. I really, really hope that goes away and that Blackbaud doesn’t raise the barriers of entry for new developers. That’s a great way of driving away a lot of future ISVs from the platform. Well, at least the web services API is open but it’s in SOAP, not REST. And yes, you can now do Facebook and MSN Virtual Earth mashups with Blackbaud applications and that will also be rolled into Raiser’s Edge 8.

And that gets me to the end of Part 1. The next part will discuss what Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing can do, how they’re architected and what that means for Raiser’s Edge 8.

It looks like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is going to demo Dynamics Live today at San Diego. This is the presumed Office 2007/Sharepoint/CRM convergence we were told would happen. Anyone know of anybody liveblogging the Convergence 2007 conference?

So I’ve added more vendors to the poll in the hopes of cutting down on the mysterious “Other” choice, yet the “Other” choice for CRM keeps popping up as a leading choice. Those of you who vote for “Other”, what does it mean to you when you vote for “Other”? Does it mean you think that the list of vendors don’t include your particular choice for a CRM or does it mean that you think that there’s going to be some “other” CRM, yet to be made, that will become as dominant as Raiser’s Edge is now?

Microsoft, Google, and two other technology companies will develop a code of conduct with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights, they announced Friday.

The two companies along with Yahoo, and Vodafone Group said the new guidelines are the result of talks with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

It’s an excellent development and I hope it doesn’t turn into a new media version of greenwashing. This press release has more details than the article you’re seeing on the tech sites. The tech news articles only list Microsoft and Google but Yahoo! is in there as well. Yahoo! certainly needs to reclaim their spot as a good and ethical provider of information since their badly played attempt to impose censorship in China.

I know their sales force is active in the nonprofit space, I get calls from their Dynamics sales team every few months. Obviously they see our vertical as important but I wonder if they know how to penetrate the market. I know one sure thing that gets noticed in the nonprofit tech world: is the product free?