There had been a lot of speculation concerning the eTapestry API and now we’re finally getting some news. eTapestry’s API will be offered for free next week! That’s pretty exciting news for developers I’m sure. While Blackbaud isn’t offering Raiser’s Edge’s (say that three times fast) API for free yet, the eTapestry API will be free to developers. However, eTapestry’s own API documentation admits the API cannot:
- Allow mass entry of accounts or journal entries – must pass data one at a time.
- Update existing gifts or pledges.
- Delete accounts or journal data.
- Add or modify relationships.
- Query and return large data lists
It’s crippleware, meaning that it’s intentionally underpowered to prevent the wholesale export of your records to another provider. It’s similar in that respect to Convio’s API although Blackbaud is honest about the limitations. Convio doesn’t even bother to mention that.
At this point Kintera’s API is still the best in terms of capabilities but you couldn’t tell that by the most recent filings from Kintera. 
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This spin infuriates me. I am already an upset eTap customer. I learned from a financial report that Blackbaud told analysts they planned to “end of life” most of their recent acquisitions. From several calls to my support contacts my donor database will have its end of life in about 24 months, but they were developing APIs to help migrate to another Dbase.(Probably Razors Edge). Had I known this I would have never left Kintera. What developer will develop around a product that has an end of life? Are they providing this to move me to a database that has no free APIs? Why do they tell investors before they tell customers and tell them different things than they tell customers?
Hey, do you have a link to that financial report you mentioned? I’ve never heard that.
I’m not sure what financial report you are referring to, but I can assure you that eTapestry is continuing its upgrade path on its current platform, and we are excited for its growth into the Spanish-speaking market. (Definitely not a market strategy for a dying product.) By providing an open API for eTapestry, we are only furthering an already strong commitment to maintaining the solution for nonprofits that want a SaaS solution. This very topic is addressed in a podcast featuring Marc Chardon and Jay Love.
Ever closer to the free RE API. I still think they are ramping up to that, and these last 2 announcements are testing the waters to see what the response is from customers.
I would think that the free RE API would come out the minute Salesforce.com buys Convio (just kidding — no inside info here). The point is, Blackbaud is definitely sitting on its laurels here waiting for the competition to one-up it. If MPower all of a sudden started taking on huge numbers of clients, we might see Blackbaud change its tune.
I’ve asked my board member to share the analyst report as you have to buy them or be a client to get the copy. It was Jefferies or Stanford, I can’t recall. The podcast is nice, but it needs to be shared with the staff at eTap as they are not nearly as confident in the future as that posting is.
[...] Will they continue in that direction? Blackbaud’s other recent acquisition, eTapestry, did open up their APIs recently, although they leave much to be [...]
Has anyone gotten this thing to work? The documentation is pretty sketchy. This seems like a bait-and-switch – they make the API available for ‘free’ but don’t include any example code, instead charging a minimum of $1,250.00 to answer any simple question.
I’m getting a generic deserialization error when I try to pass complex data types as per the documentation. But my object sure looks right, as far as I can tell. Any responses would be appreciated.
I'm using .net 3.5 and can login, but get invalid session errors after that. It sounds like you've gotten a lot further than me Jim!
I wish there was a community forum/wiki were I could find good examples…
-jon
Is there such a thing as an eTapestry sandbox where you can play around with API calls? I've noticed that announcements are not nearly as interesting as the ad-hoc development environments that good open API providers give to their devs.