Now here's something that may prove to be revolutionary. I don't know if salesforce.com were the first people to do hosted CRM applications, but they are certainly the ones that seem to be the most talked about.

Now they've got AppExchange where you can develop or use applications that people have written to work with salesforce.com.

Mashups are very Web 2.0, but here you have a mechanism that you can make money out of a mashup that you create.

The Regiser has a good overview of it.

I looked for nonprofit or charity applications and only found two, no make that four, two more have appeared since I started looking yesterday. The most useful one is volunteer management which salesforce.com use themselves for when their employees do volunteering.

The attraction of the hosted CRM application idea for charities is the fact that you don't need IT support staff so much, which may be an issue if you're small.

tag: charity non-profit crm web 2.0

Here's a conference which you may find gives a good perspective on Agile programming:
www.waterfall2006.com

Tags: agile

I've been crafting some SQL to query the Raiser's Edge database. If you want some tips then let me know.
Here's one for nothing: not all ids link back to the CONSTITUENT table, usually its RECORDS.

Are you an IT professional in the SF, LA or Seattle areas? My colleagues in the US are running a two day introduction to IT and mission. There are more details at www.jaars.org/checkitout. There are live interviews with people in field locations, but unfortunately you don't get to talk to me. I know a couple of the guys who are organising it and it should be good.

We have adopted the Agile approach on some of our software development projects, which I'll write about another time, but in the meantime, here's a blog on Agile Management and in particular a post on Stretching Agile to Fit CMMI level 3 which is going to be of interest to some of my colleagues.

I'm signed up for the (UK) Charity Finance Directors Group IT conference on 22 February 2006. I went to a meeting on IT in November last year and gathered some vaguely useful links:

Charity IT Resource Alliance which has whitepapers, news and the inevitable forums on Charity and IT use. No RSS feed for news, though I did suggest this to them.

Guidestar appears to be a UK offshoot of the US Guidestar charity information site. It's recently gone live and has some information on every charity in England and Wales, drawn from the official records.

Net:Gain help charities do strategic IT planning.

Charities Resource Network has a membership fee last time I checked, and the site is currently down, so try later.

I'm quite impressed with the Idealware website. They aim to do reviews of nonprofit software. It's fairly new, but does seem to have good articles on low cost constituent databases, and online donation tools. I'm waiting to see what they say about The Raiser's Edge from Blackbaud which we use.

They only aim to cover US software, but some stuff may travel the Atlantic well, unless its heavily financial.