PICnet Blog

In an effort to help spread the word of open source content management systems (CMS) and constituent relationship management systems (CRM), I was asked to give a talk at OneWorld on March 28, 2007 to the OneWorld Peer Learning Exchange. Roshani Kothari from OneWorld was gracious enough to write up some great notes on it (see below) as well as post a podcast of this.

Listen to the MP3 of the talk

Thanks to Roshani for her hard work to make these OneWorld Peer Learning Exchanges occur, and to my co-presenters Alan Rosenblatt and Guy Stevens for their contributions.

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Last week, Peter Russell from Joomla Juice, the leading Joomla podcast, interviewed moi regarding our efforts in putting together the first Joomla! Day in the United States, as well as the effects of Joomla and open source in the non-profit sector.

Listen to the show directly from the player on the Joomla Juice site or subscribe to the podcast (highly recommended).

Notes include:

• Open Source Matters Board
• N-TEN’s Non-Profit Technology Conference (April 4-6, 2007 - Washington, DC)
  
• Joomla Tuesdays
• Penguin Day 2007 (April 7, 2007 - Washington, DC)
• European Commission
• Joomla!Day USA West (May 11-12, 2007 - Mountain View, CA)
  
• The GooglePlex

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece called Islands and bridges: why Soapbox will lead the way to CRM and CMS integration for non-profits, where I detailed our vision on breaking down the walls between important technology silos in the non-profit community.

At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful.

A full three months have passed since then, and I think it’s about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.

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We PICnetters use Basecamp for project management and when we learned they had released an API and saw the interesting things people were doing with it, we thought, “hey let’s integrate”. Not because it’s cool (though the closer we get to Web 2.0 tools, the cooler we all seem here around the office), but because we saw a need, at least internally, for some extended functionality: easy time tracking and reporting.

Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp.

Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we’ve dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn’t closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we’re nearing that limit.

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Every year we’re pleased to collaborate with our friends at Aspiration on Penguin Day, and this year Penguin Day 2007 will occur the day after the Non-Profit Technology Conference, on April 7, 2007. At Penguin Days, non-profit organizations explore the range of issues and options involved using Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS).

Fun things to check out about Penguin Day 2007:

• Main Event Page
• Agenda
• Participant List

We’re looking forward to having the same great Penguin Day that we had last year in Seattle!

Gotta love the community. A group of developers are putting their heads together to create an excellent tutorial on the new Joomla 1.5 MVC (model, view, controller) structure and how to build a component using MVC and the new Joomla libraries. This is a great resource for all you developers out there. Hope to see some good components come out in the future because of this.

Sometimes your schedule changes, and you’ve got to rearrange a meeting. Then sometimes you get invited to have lunch and go to Joomla presentations by core team members to a Google developer audience and your day completely changes.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending a few sessions at the Googleplex, led by Joomla team members including Louis Landry, Wilco Jansen, Hannes Papenberg and Laurens Vandeput. Their Google guide for the trip, Leslie Hawthorn, is a wonderful mix of open source developer mom and supporter of everything that leads to happy developers. She’s even talked about the great open source speakers series that they’re having a Google these days, including our Joomla devs.

Throughout tomorrow I’ll do my best to post updates to the blog, including some video and photos of the talks. I’ll also make sure to provide fully detailed reports on the Google cafeteria food, which I promise to eat until fully stuffed.

(Photos and video after the page flip…)

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In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for Joomla and Salesforce.com users. We’re a bunch of regular matchmakers.

Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive.

I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:

• Non-Profit Salesforce.com Practioners Google group
• Non-Profit forums at Salesforce.com
• Twice a month conference call with non-profit practitioners

When I had a chance to demo what we’ve already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin’s tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.

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When PICnet first grew legs in early 2001, there was one new group that we watched closely in our sector: the Non-Profit Open Source Initiative. After a few years slowly quieting down, NOSI has been given a new lease on life by its leader, Michelle Murrain, of Zen and the Art of Non-Profit Technology fame.

I met with Michelle in San Francisco’s ferry building yesterday to discuss everything from NOSI to open source sessions happening at this year’s Non-Profit Technology Conference. She’s found her way back to non-profit technology after a short hiatus, and has been finding a variety of ways to throw herself back into the ballgame. For instance, Michelle and I are working closely with Holly at N-TEN to make sure that open source is a strong part of the sessions, affinity groups, and geekouts at the upcoming NTC.

Meanwhile, Michelle is on a mission to make NOSI a self-sustaining organization that once again lead our non-profit open source community. I think partnering with great groups like N-TEN and Aspiration, she’ll be able to pull it off. What’s going to be necessary, as Michelle knows, is for NOSI to have a tangible deliverable to our community, much like what they produced in the open source primer for non-profits.

She’s got a couple of great ideas for NOSI, and I don’t want to steal her thunder, but I think that anything that brings together open source and best practices/case studies from real non-profits will better aid organizations that are interested in using open source.

In our continuing efforts to bring you breaking news from the Joomla - Salesforce.com integration front (humbly known as J!Salesforce), we’re pleased to report that our master J!Salesforce developer Kevin has made a few more breakthroughs that should make developers’ hearts skip.

Basic use-case proven: member directory

One of the basic use-cases we had to achieve was to display a basic member directory system, that allows visitors to search for members in the Salesforce database based on any of the variables the site’s administrators allow searching within. We now are able to have three basic views for this directory:

• search
• search results
• detailed view of a record

Best part about all this: it’s pretty quick! Even though we’ve got the system pinging Salesforce a few times, the roundtrips for data retrieval are very tolerable. I’m sure the bigger your database, the longer it might take, but it’s pretty quick in our development test bed.

Create new user in Joomla and contact in Salesforce at registration

Another big hurdle leaped over by Kevin last week was the ability to make a seamless registration system for Joomla and Salesforce. When someone signs up to be a member on your site, or to be added to your organization’s rolls as a volunteer or donor, J!Salesforce immediately adds them as a user in Joomla and a contact in Salesforce.

This one step alone will save countless hours for administrators that are fed up with having their Joomla site and CRM user managers out of sync, and hopefully keep hair on the heads of development directors that are sick and tired of missing the connection.

Goals for this week

With all this great work going on, we’re gearing up to let the non-profit world know about what’s about to be released in early January. We’re keeping in touch with our friends at the Salesforce Foundation, and we’re hoping to work closely with Salesforce to help spread the word through either their AppExchange or other online collaboration tools.

Meanwhile, on the development side, Kevin will be continuing to clean up the front-end and build some developer guidelines, so when we release it, we’ll be able to make life easier (not harder) for our developer friends.