Prelude Interactive

NTC was, for me, a catharsis.  It validated my decision, a bit more than a year ago, to commit myself to the risk and reward of entrepreneurship in the nonprofit sector.  The feeling was akin to the first few weeks on the ‘engineering floor’ of my freshman dormatory:  A discovery that those around me are both delightful and mutually interested in the same puzzles.  You mean we can never leave the dorm, play Starcraft all night long, and spend the rest of the time mocking one another over labwork? That then was living rightly.  NPTech, for me, is living rightly now.

It’s no secret that I have a sappy crush on the Social Actions concept and the team driving it.  Jon Dunn did remind me that in the community there are always a dozen competing pet theories with quarreling camps – these are fads, few of which will prove themselves and become part of the zeitgeist.  Even with this tempering reminder, I’m still prepared to do everything I can for the project that time will allow.  I enjoyed catching up with Christine Egger, hearing her story, and finding out that she’s a rare person who can be totally, cooly, and fanatically devoted to her job without sounding insane.  Engage Joe (Solomon) was,  as always, a delight – I was sad to learn he’s moving on from the project, for now.   If you’re having a bad day remember that whatever idea you have that was just shot down is the best idea he’s ever heard – and he’ll really sell it back to you.  I was also impressed with Peter Dietz.  He explains the Social Actions concept and guided the surrounding discussion with patience and clarity – bringing the nontechnical and uninitiated into their tent with far more success than I would ever have.

Just like I expected to hate SalesForce and grudgingly became a fan of the platform, I was unexpectedly impressed by Blackbaud’s presentation of Apex.  I still wonder why on earth they chose that name for it, when SalesForce, presumably one of their main competitors in years to come, also has a technology of the same name.  We laugh at market analysis firms that spend gobs of money and take weeks to produce milquetoast name suggestions, but…well, who knows.  I won’t pretend to know any better, though my choice would have been “Data Reaper” or “Juggernaut Market Crusher” as that seems more in line with their intent.

Anyway, Blackbaud’s Apex, (not to be confused with SalesForce Apex, or PEX flexible plumbing components) looks to be a powerful report, query, publish, configure, everything engine.  The CTO Shaun Sullivan was clearly enjoying a chance to flex his nerd muscles to the world outside Blackbaud’s secret, subterranian laboratories.  They apparently abstracted every piece of data, every logic rule, and every function into a mesh of 10,000 entities that can be mixed, combined, and reconfigured on the fly – so in theory a customized mix of what’s happening in your data can be output as anything:  RSS, iPhone widget, web widget, Excel report.  SalesForce has impressive depth and possibilities with Custom Objects and fields along with their main platform, but Blackbaud’s Apex architecture demo seems to be at least one generation beyond it.  The fact that they had the patience to spend 4 years developing it from the ground up is highly impressive for a public company (notice the post NTC bump).

Still, how many people internal to Blackbaud are going to understand and use this technology to its fullest potential while providing client services – and how many of their clients would actually be ready and able to use it out of the box?  The Apex platform seems to be so mind bendingly abstract and advanced that an even bigger ecosystem of consultants, service partners, and trainers may be needed to put it to use.  Whether or not Blackbaud is truly prepared to open up more and let the community solve part of this significant challenge, rather than keep the consulting dollars to themselves, remains to be seen.

I did awkwardly introduce myself to Steve MacLaughlin at a bar Monday night, and attempted to convey my positive impression of their session.  I believe I failed to effectively do so.  I believe these paragraphs may also contribute to further awkwardness.  Hey Blackbaud’s PR tentacle who probably outsources a web-scraping tool:  No hard feelings, OK?

Also unexpected?  Cozying up with Convio.  Convio has always been Kirk’s wheelhouse, and aside from the one or two Common Ground projects I helped him with, I’ve not pursued their gigs, lest there be Das Fossundwatsonhaus non-compete fracas of some kind.  I mean hey, they’re in town, a lot of people use their platform, they’re SalesForce Friendly ™, and JordanV would definitely help me mess with The soon to mysteriously disappear Neffster, right?  Win win win, and win.

The SalesForce, Plone & Friends session was excellent and useful.  John Stahl and Steve Andersen of OneNW, and Chris Johnson of ifPeople cleanly articulated much wisdom regarding the role and responsibilities of a consultant within the NPTech community.  I also learned about several SalesForce integration projects:  Plone, Drupal, and Joomla as well.  Open source CMSes are the bomb diggety, if SalesForce’s currently nonexistent CMS capabilities catch up in the next 5 years, I will eat my hat.

There are scads of people and ideas I also want to gush about, but my battery is almost dead and this is a too-long blog post anyway.  Besides, it’s now Thursday night so this is like, totally old news.  So long and thanks for all the fish! (until next year).

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