January 2009

Colossus vs. Cloud - an Email System Showdown

By Peter Campbell, January 30, 2009

If your nonprofit has 40 or more people on staff, it's a likely bet that you use Microsoft Exchange as your email server. There are, of course, many nonprofits that will use the email services that come with your web hosting, and there are some using legacy products like Novell's Groupwise or Lotus Notes/Domino. But the market share for email and groupware has gone to Microsoft, and, at this point, the only compelling up and coming competition comes from Google.

There are reasons why Microsoft has dominated the market. Exchange is a mature and powerful product, that does absolutely everything that an email system has to do, and offers powerful calendaring, contact management and information sharing features on top of it. A quick comparison to Google's GMail offering might look a bit like "Bambi vs. Godzilla". And, as Michelle pointed out the other day, GMail might be a risky proposition, despite it being more affordable, because it puts your entire mail store "in the cloud". But Gmail's approach is so radically different from Microsoft's that I think it deserves a more detailed pro/con comparison.

Before we start, it's important to acknowledge that the major difference is the hosted/cloud versus local installation, and there's a middle ground - services that host Exchange for you - Microsoft even has their own cloud service. If you are evaluating email platforms and including GMail and Exchange, hosted Exchange should be weighed as an additional option. But my goal here is to contrast the new versus the traditional, and traditional Exchange installations are in your server room, not someone else's.

Server Platform

Installing Exchange is not a simple task. Smaller organizations can get away with cheaper hardware, but the instructions say that you'll need a large server for mail storage; a secondary server for web and internet functions, and, most likely, a third server to house your third party anti-spam and anti-virus solutions. Plus, Exchange won't work in a Linux or Novell network - there has to be an additional server running Microsoft's Active Directory in place before you can even install it. It can be a very stable product if you get the installation right, but getting it right means doing a lot of prep and research, because the slim documents that come in the box don't prepare you for the complexity. Once you have it running, you have to run regular maintenance and keep a close watch - along with mailbox limits - to insure that the message bases don't fill up or corrupt.

GMail, on the other hand, is only available as a hosted solution. Setup is a matter of mapping your domain to Google's services (can be tricky, but child's play compared to Exchange) and adding your users.

Win - GMail. It saves you a lot of expense, when you factor in the required IT time and expertise with the hardware and software costs for multiple servers.

EMail Clients

Outlook has it's weaknesses - slow and obtuse search, poor spam handling, and a tendency toward unexplained crashes and slowdowns on a regular basis. But, as a traditional mail client, it has a feast of features. There isn't much that you can't do with it. One of the most compelling reasons to stick with Outlook is it's extensibility. Via add-ons and integrations, Outlook can serve as a portal to applications, databases, web sites and communications. In a business environment, you might be sacrificing some key functionality without it, much as you often have to use Internet explorer in order to access business-focused web sites.

But where Outlook is a very hefty application, with tons of features and settings buried in it's cavernous array of menus and dialog boxes, Gmail is deceptively uncluttered. The truth is that the web-based GMail client can do a lot of sophisticated tricks, including a few that Outlook can't -- like allowing you to decide that you'd rather "Reply to All" mid-message -- and some that you can only do with Outlook by enabling obscure features and clicking around a lot, like threading conversations and applying multiple "tags" to a single message. Gmail is the first mail client to burst out of the file cabinet metaphor. Once you get used to this, it's liberating. Messages don't get archived to drawers, they get tagged with one or more labels. You can add stars to the important ones. It's not that you can't emulate this workflow in Outlook, it's that it's fast and smooth in GMail, and supported by a very intelligent and blazingly fast search function. Of course, if that doesn't float your boat, you can always use Outlook - or any other standard POP3 or IMAP client - to access GMail.

Win - GMail. It's more innovative and flexible, and I didn't even dig deep.

Availability

Exchange, of course, is not subject to the vagaries of internet availability when you're at the office. Mind you, much of the mail that you're waiting to receive is. And Outlook - if you run in "Cached mode" - has had offline access down for ages. GMail just started experimenting with that this week. If you're not in the office, Exchange supports a variety of ways to get to the mail. Outlook Web Access (OWA) is a sophisticated web-based client that, with Exchange 2007 and IE as the browser, almost replicates the desktop Outlook experience. OMA is a mobile-friendly web interface. And ActiveSync, which is supported on many phones (including the iPhone) is the most powerful, stable and feature-rich synchronization platform available. Exchange can do POP and IMAP as well, and also supports a VPN-like mode called Outlook Anywhere (or HTTPS over RPC).

GMail only supports web, pop and IMAP. There's a mobile GMAIL app which is available on more phones than Activesync is, but it isn't as robust or full featured as Microsoft's offering.

So, oddly, the Win for remote access goes to Microsoft over Google, because Microsoft's offerings are plentiful and mature.

Business Continuity

So, not to belabor this, Exchange is well supported by many powerful backup products. In cached mode, it mirrors your server mailbox to your dektop, which is additional redundancy.

GMail is in the cloud, so backup isn't quite as straightforward. Offline mode does some synchronization, like Exchange's cached mode, but it's not 100% or, at this point, configurable. Prudent GMail users will, even if they don't read mail in it, set up a POP email program to regularly download their mail in order to have a local copy.

Win - Microsoft

Microsoft also Wins the security comparison - Google can, and has, cut off user's email accounts. There seem to have been good reasons, such as chasing out hackers who had commandeered accounts. But keeping your email on your backed-up server behind your firewall will always be more secure than the cloud.

But I'd hedge that award with the consideration that Exchange's complex ity is a risk in itself. It's all well and safe if it is running optimally and it's being backed up. But most nonprofits are strapped when it comes to the staffing and cost to support this kind of solution. If you can't provide the proper care and feeding that a system like Exchange requires, you might well be at more risk with an in-house solution. The competence of a vendor like Google managing your servers is a plus.

Finally, cost. GMail wins hands down. The supported Google Apps platform is free for nonprofits. Microsoft offers us deep discounts with their charity pricing, but Dell and HP don't match on the hardware, and certified Microsoft Administrators come in the $60-120k annual range.

So, in terms of ease of management and cost, GMail easily wins. There are some big trade-offs between Microsoft's kitchen sink approach to features and Google's intelligent, progressive functionality, and, in well-resourced environments, Microsoft is the secure choice, but in tightly resourced ones - like nonprofits - GMail is a stable and supported option. The warnings about trusting Google -- or any other Software as a Service vendor -- are prudent, but there are a lot of factors to weigh. And it's going to come down to a lot of give and take, with considerations particular to your environment, to determine what the effective choice is. In a lot of cases, the cloud will weigh heavier on the scale than the colossus.

Should you move you email to "the cloud"?

By Michelle Murrain, January 27, 2009

A report from Forrester Research (outlined in this ReadWriteWeb post) suggests that for most enterprises, hosting email with Google is the cheapest option available. In general, outsourcing your email, and putting it into "the cloud" is most likely going to be more cost effective than hosting it yourself.

As nonprofit organizations look to trim budgets in this coming tough climate, is this the time to outsource email? Outsourcing email saves you from buying new servers, paying for Exchange seats, worrying about spam filtering, etc.

So what are the downsides? The downsides come from the basic fact that your email is not really in your total control anymore. If you are using something like GMail, you need to find a way to back it up. You can use a mail client like Outlook or Apple Mail, which loads a copy of the email locally. There are other ways to back up Gmail if you want to stick to using the web client.

For some organizations that do sensitive work (Chinese democracy activists for example, or anarchists and the like) using a service like GMail is a security risk - if Google or most providers are asked to hand over information, you can bet they will, since it is in their best interest to do so, not to fight a government. If your organization runs the risk of coming to the attention of the powers that be, GMail or a service like it is probably not a good option. Nor is it a good option if you need to share confidential client information.

However, there are good nonprofit-focused email/hosting providers, like May First/People Link, or Electric Embers, that can be much more secure places to keep sensitive data, since they are smaller, and work with a lot of activist groups.

If you make a careful choice, and make sure you've got backup plans, outsourcing email could be a good money saver during this time of trimming budgets.

Open Source: What Are We Really Afraid Of?

By Eric Leland, January 26, 2009

A BBC news article got me thinking, what is it that really keeps people from moving to open source solutions.? In Open Source Questions for Schools, Andrew Miller looks at the British government recent efforts to introduce open source as a procurement option for schools, and illuminates some interesting pros and cons.

The article quotes John Spencer from Sirius, a company involved in installing open source solutions in schools, as saying "...Good teachers will always be looking to move forward but they are so busy that they are often conservative." While Open Source may indeed suffer from various image issues (no support, low quality, not compatible, etc), perhaps most simply it is major systems change that continues to drive people to go with what they know.

Strong planning along with decisive execution are key requirements for succeeding in major system changes. Many resource starved groups among NGOs and education organizations would understandably become more conservative in the face of of the software unknown. I have found this approach both prudent, and exasperating, when working on technology planning projects.

It can be especially prudent, when you have some open source representatives claiming "liberation" from lock-in, or from costs associated with "enforced" upgrades. Getting into a complicated software tool is plenty of lock-in, and we are not liberated from costs associated with upgrades, at least if the open source tool has a large community of support improving it. Sure, if I am thrown off a boat, my freedom liberates me from having to swim...

For the most part, the article reminded me that the choice between any collection of tools should remain rooted in pragmatism. We should neither be swept away by the software cost, its branding, or its openness, but by a host of factors most important for our needs.

Regime Change

By Peter Campbell, January 23, 2009

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the news reports about how the Obama staff reacted to the technology in place at the White House. If you haven’t been tracking this, you can read the full story, but the short story is this: the Mac/Blackberry/Facebook-savvy Obama staffers were shocked to find ancient systems and technology in use at the White House – Windows XP, MS Office 2003, traditional phone lines, and web filtering in place – in other words, the same stuff my org uses. I found myself both sympathetic and skeptical regarding their plight, because I am a big fan of all of the new technology that they are familiar with, but they walked into a network that is a lot like 90% of the businesses out there. The Bush Administration, perhaps surprisingly, was fairly current in their use of technology.

Some quick things I draw from this:

* The Obama campaign distinguished themselves by their smart use of modern, internet technology, and that use played a major role in their successful campaign.

* The shock they’re facing is less about the technology in place than it is about the culture they’re moving into. Political teams run freely and nimbly, and Howard Dean established the Web as the infrastructure of choice in 2004. Businesses, like the White House, do not drive so close to the cutting edge, for a variety of good reasons, such as the need for standardization and security.

* Over the next few months, the Obama-ans are going to compromise, and I’m dying to learn what choices they’ll make.

In my work, I'm on both sides of that fence every day, working with staff to understand why we have to standardize in order to manage our systems, stay a little behind the curve in order to avoid risk, and stick with applications like Microsoft Office because they have the mature feature set that we require. At the same time, I rally my staff to be creative in finding tools and solutions for our people, to stay abreast of which new tools are going to be worth the risk in terms of the benefits they offer, and understand that, should we get too far behind, it will be as risky as being too far out on the technological edge. We don't want to fall off of any cliffs, nor do we want to stand still as all of the other cars race around us.

Some of us, like the leader of the free world, can't imagine a day without a Blackberry; others, like a former free world leader, don't even want an email account. Most of us live in this world where we have to creatively embrace the new while we tighten our grips on the traditional, because technology platforms thrive on stability while they obsolesce rapidly. Where the Obama White House winds up might be a good indicator of where we should all be. I hope we’ll have a window into that.

Selling the Experience: The Quest for a Constituent-Centric Nonprofit

By Paul Hagen, January 22, 2009

Companies like JetBlue, Starbucks, and Apple don’t sell just a product or service; they sell an experience. So, what does this have to do with nonprofits? I would argue that some nonprofits do a pretty good job of packaging “experience” with what they do. Heifer, Save the Children, and Kiva do a pretty decent job of connecting donors directly to recipients, using online tools for donors to view pictures and stories of the people they are directly supporting. I would also argue in this communications-hyped world, your nonprofits’ actions speak louder than words.

How well is your nonprofit doing at creating a superior constituent experience? According to market research firm Forrester Research, there are three areas to look at:

1)Obsess about constituent needs. While your organization may have its own needs and wants (e.g. raising money, filling events, selling subscriptions, and serving individuals), constituent-centric organizations identify different target segments and spend time getting to know the wants and needs of those constituents well.
2)Reinforce the brand with every interaction, not just marketing. Every interaction that a constituent has with a staff person, web site, or voice response speaks volumes about your organization’s brand. Marketing messages struggle overcome a bad experiences. Review and fix processes that don’t reinforce the essence of your organization.
3)Treat customer experience as a competence everyone needs to have. Interact with any staff -- checkers, stockers, customer service – at companies like Trader Joes or Whole Foods and you will find super friendly help; it’s not just management or communications. Management at companies like Jet Blue spend as much or more time reminding staff of the desired customer experience as they do communicating that externally.

What’s the bottom line of creating great constituent experiences? Of the 112 companies and 5000 consumers that it researched, Forrester found that firms with the best experiences resulted in 15% more consumers purchasing additional products or services over those with the worst rated experiences. Furthermore, customer reluctance to switch to competitors was 18% higher for those with the best experiences compared to the worst. Translating to nonprofits, this means more people donating, attending addition events, and more services consumed, as well as fewer constituents opting to send their money and spend their time with alternative nonprofits.

Convio + Salesforce = A Promising Common Ground

By Paul Hagen, January 22, 2009

I’ve been playing around with Convio’s new fundraising management tool built on Salesforce called Common Ground. Bottom line: I’m super impressed! While software rarely ever fully impresses me, Convio did a bunch of things right:

- Very strong donor management baseline for most nonprofits. For the vast majority of nonprofits (especially small- to mid-sized ones), Convio outstrips the functionality most will need.
- Doesn’t break Salesforce mold. Unlike other solutions that attempt to cover over the standard object names and structure of the Salesforce database, Convio stays true to it. This means that it will stay aligned much better with continuing development of the platform, as well as enable flexibility for other applications that use standard object names.
- Reasonable pricing. My biggest fear was that it’s pricing structure would put it outside the reach of most nonprofits, like it’s content management system. However, they came in at $100/seat with a minimum two seat minimum. While outside the reach of the smallest organizations, it seems very fair, especially given the power of the platform that the nonprofit gets.

Add a bunch of great third party tools that are available in the Salesforce ecosystem (Vertical Response for bulk email, Demand Tools for data cleaning, a couple of options for events, ect.), Common Ground adds a really strong puzzle piece that most nonprofits need.

The biggest oversight and a big bummer right now is not having a basic online transaction engine built in so that nonprofits can take online donations and have those feed right into the system. Even using an already available PayPal alternative would be better than nothing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company continue to migrate more aspects of its platform over towards Salesforce and leverage the vast amount of development happening in the ecosystem. This positions it well to compete against Blackbaud across a broader market.

Content Management Ease of What? For Who?

By Laura Quinn, January 21, 2009

Here at Idealware world headquarters, we're in the thick of researching a report comparing open source content management systems - WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone. We started with a bunch of interviews, and one of the themes that emerged was crystal clear: ease of use was critical to almost everyone evaluating systems.

But trying to pin down what exactly "ease of use" means is a lot harder.

There's a lot of different users and functions of a CMS, and the ease of use appears to - from our initial research - differ for different functions, even in the same system. So for instance, it's looking like the CMS that's the hardest to install is actually one of the easiest to setup a simple site with (once it's installed). One of the ones that's easiest to learn how to implement is one of the most difficult to add a new menu item. Etcetera.

So there's a lot of different types of ease of use to look at and try to boil down to compare the systems. Here's what I'm currently thinking - though this will no doubt evolve as we work on the report... I'd love your thoughts.

For Non-technical Folks Updating the Site

Ease of Core Content Admin: Can someone non-technical easily edit the text on a page? Add a page? Add an image, doc, video?
Ease of Site Extension: Once a site is up and running, how easy is it for content admins to, say, add a new menu item? Or add in a new event calendar?

For More Technical Site Admins

Ease of Installation: If you're starting with just a server, how hard is it for someone experienced with the system to install the CMS?
Ease of Theming: How easy is it to implement a custom graphic design, for someone familiar with the system?
Ease of Setting Up a Simple Site: How easy is it to configure the structure and pages for a simple site - just a handful of pages and perhaps an event calendar?
Ease of Setting Up a Complicated Site: It's never going to be trivial to configure a complex site, but does the system support the advanced configurer in doing complicated things? Or does it require lots of crazy workarounds?
Ease of Customization: If you want to create your own customized modules, apps, etc, how easy is that? Does the system give you solid hooks, or make you jump through hoops?
Ease of Upgrades: How easy is it to tell if an upgrade is something you want, and then get it installed?
Learning Curve: And for all this more technical stuff - how hard is it to learn? What's the difference between the time it's likely to take the first time, and then after?

Okay, so that's a lot. No idea how we're going to analyze all that data down into something comprehensible, but, well, the journey begins with the first step.

What do you think? Is this a solid list, or did I get it wrong?

Resource Roundup 1/20

By Laura Quinn, January 20, 2009

Using video in online appeals (Mal Warwick's Newsletter)
Michael Stein offers some useful tips for integrating videos into your fundraising appeals.

Adults and Social Networking Sites (Pew Internet)
Woohoo! Solid, reliable data on who's using social networking sites (a lot of people!), and a bit about what they're doing there.

What Does “Viral” Mean? (e.politics)
A nice look at what "viral" means - and doesn't mean - in the context of say, a viral video

The Three Dimensions of Social Media ROI (NTEN)
Nice, common sense look at how to go about thinking about ROI for social media (or really, any outreach effort)

14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website (Conversion Rate Experts)
Great roundup of tools and utilities that can help understand what folks are doing on your website

Integration of CRM and CMS (Zen of Nonprofit Tech)
Over on her own blog, friend of Idealware Michelle Murrain talks about the desirability of and some of the possible methods to integrate a website Content Management System with a Constituent Relationship System.

The Death of Email (is being prematurely reported)

By Peter Campbell, January 15, 2009

Friends of mine who are active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are fond of proclaiming that email is dead. And, certainly, those of us who are active on these networks send less email to each other than we used to. I'm much more likely to direct message, tweet, or write on someone's wall if I have a quick question, comment or information referral for someone, the latter two if it's a question or info that I might benefit from having other people in my online community see.

But I don't see these alternatives as ships carrying the grim reaper onto email's shores -- I think they're more likely the saviors of email. As I said a couple of weeks ago in my "Myth of KISS" post, email applications are heavily abused, and they're not very good at managing large amounts of information. This hasn't stopped a good 90% of the people online from using email as their primary information aggregator. We get:

Personal emails

Mailing List items

ENewsletters

Automated alerts

Spam!

and a host of other things

in our email inboxes every day. The inbox places new messages on top and older messages scroll down and out of sight. Almost every email program on earth lets you, as you make time for it, pull emails into named folders, mark them as important, order them by name or date or subject, search for them, and archive them to some other part of your storage space, but none of them do more than some basic filtering and prioritizing for you, perhaps IDing 90% of the spam and, if you're a power user, allowing you to place messages from certain people in special folders.

The exception to the standard email processing rules is Google's GMail, which does innovative threading and labeling, allowing for, in my opinion, a superior tool for information management, but it's still a lot of work. The tools will improve, but it's kind of like hiring a better maid service to clean up congress - they'll make the halls shinier, but the same legislators will show up for work on the next day.

The answer is to acknowledge that email applications, as we know them, were never meant to process upwards of twenty or thirty messages a day. The information management defaults assume a manageable number of items, and many of us are way past that threshold. The power of alternative messaging mediums is that they are tailored to the types of messages they deliver, and their tools sets are accordingly more refined and targeted. If you get newsletters and alerts in your email, switch to RSS. If you do a lot of short messages or work coordination, look at IM. If you announce or broadcast information, or survey your contacts, use Twitter or Facebook. These mediums are, so far, much less susceptible to spam, and you can ignore messages once you've read them or skipped them, they don't have to be deleted. The closer you get to only receiving personal email in your inbox, the easier it will be to keep up with it

So these new mediums aren't gunning to eliminate our old, old electronic friend - they're just allowing it to go on a long overdue diet.

Web2.0 won't be free for much longer

By Michelle Murrain, January 14, 2009

Free Web 2.0 services abound. From flickr to Twitter, from Gliffy to delicious. Many of us have come to completely depend on them for our daily workflow. But today, one of them, SproutBuilder, announced that it would no longer be free (or even have a free level of service.)

Of course, these web services cost money to run. They have servers to keep going, staff, developers, and the like. In this economy, raising money for a business with no revenue stream must be trying. Business credit has dried up. Venture capital isn't flowing. And hopes of acquisition in this kind of climate must be dimming.

So what does this mean for nonprofit organizations that depend on these services? Some of these services have already started monetizing a while ago. More will, like SproutBuilder. It means dropping free plans, or creating free plans that include less resources (accounts, storage space, etc.) than you need. It means advertising, and increasing intrusion of ads (or the need to pay for services without advertising.) It also probably means that a lot of them are going to start going under.

So, have backup plans, and have backups!