I’ve updated the Leaderboard again to include a higher recommendation for Google Apps for Domains on the strength of IMAP availability for Gmail as well as a very strong recommendation for Unfuddle for project management software for application development. I’m totally feeling Unfuddle right now. Props to Robert Dempsey, owner of Atlantic Dominion Solutions, for pointing me in Unfuddle’s direction.
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Allan, I notice that you don’t have a case management suggestion and say that you’re looking for Salesforce to perhaps fill that gap. Unless I’m missing something, Salesforce already has case management built into the Enterprise edition that nonprofits get. If that wasn’t specifically what you had in mind, would you mind elaborating?
Case management is getting there — but I’m waiting for some standardization to emerge before I recommend anything. Part of the problem is that if you want to use AppExchange stuff, you end up having to live with the nonprofitforce template which I don’t think is robust enough to handle case management yet. Do I think salesforce.com is a candidate for that? Yup.
If you decided to build a case management system on your own on salesforce.com, that would be wicked. However, we’d need other nonprofits to do the same thing as well, so we could pick out what objects are common to case management systems. I think if you got a really good salesforce.com developer and a really good social worker with great workflow analysis skills together, you could probably bang something out in a week that would work quite well. There ARE case management systems out there in salesforce.com. I’d talk to Rem Hoffman over at Exponent Parters and they’ve actually implemented one. Are they ready to productize it yet? I don’t think so but perhaps times have changed and they’re ready to do so.
I would love to see open source development on the salesforce.com platform to build a case management system that would be unbeatable. Current case management systems out there are pretty pathetic but social services nonprofits are pretty bad at building out requirements. And the big ones that do exist will never ever implement an open API — I wish the nptech community could focus on them as well. ETO Social Solutions, Foothold, etc — they make fundraising apps builders look like geniuses. I brought in Foothold myself — had salesforce.com been available for nonprofits then the way it is now, I would never have done that.