Blackbaud's 2008 Conference for Nonprofits (Montréal) - Day 2

Bonjour! Another early morning here in Montréal at the last day of the conference. Molly Maple and I are presenting the "Deep Dive into Blackbaud NetCommunity" first thing this morning. We'll be showcasing a lot of the new capabilities in BBNC v5.5. Plenty of good stuff for our Canadian clients. We covered a lot of things, got a lot of great questions, and there were quite a few moments of applause. That's always the best feedback that we got it right!

I'm now sitting in on Blackbaud CTO Shaun Sullivan's "Emerging Technologies: Blackbaud's Technology Roadmap" presentation. Shaun started off by explaining the Infinity platform and the first applications we've shipped: Blackbaud Direct Marketing, Blackbaud Enterprise CRM, ResearchPoint, and NetCommunity Universal. And we're currently developing the 8.x versions and upgrades of our existing offerings.

Shaun then went into some of the technical parts of Infinity around scalability, Open API, performance, and other really cool stuff. And there will be a "cloud catalog" for "adornments" that others develop for the platform. "Open isn't dangerous." (Plenty of security and checking, of course.) Speaking of performance, the testing done so far let Infinity do 57 batch gifts per second. And then the UI...and the oohs and ahhs began. Showing the configuration options in Blackbaud Enterprise CRM, language options, and role setup and data presentation.

Then the "Reach" topic came up....like using RSS, KPIs, widgets and gadgets, web-based report writer, web dashboards, and mobile devices through the Infinity platform. The KPI example got some big cheers. But not as big as when Shaun played "Mac Guy" and pulled up a web dashboard through Infinity on a Mac in Safari...and then started making edits on the fly. And then create your own gadget and drop it on the desktop...of a PC or a Mac. Then he opened up the iPhone SDK and showed an Infinity application that allows an iPhone user to search for a constituent in the system over the phone, complete with a photo that looks a lot like Manny Ramírez. A little example of Yahoo! Pipes + Infinity at play.

Next was little bit about Pervasive Business Intelligence and how Infinity handles it out of the box. Including geocoding location intelligence and a very carefully designed star schema with supporting OLAP cubes. And how we're thinking about options to provide this for the current Raiser's Edge 7.x customer base. What about pervasive search? Sure! People are going to expect applications to act like Google and so that has been built into the discoverability of Infinity. Quick example of search and how help content can also kick-in. (And it's pruned by security.) (And could include web items like Blackbaud's Knowledge Base.) This was followed by an on-the-fly answer to a question about query and smart query tools in the Infinity platform.

Shaun jumped to a discussion about how Blackbaud NetCommunity works with the Infinity platform. Discussion about the BBNC API, stuff posted on labs.blackbaud.com, and other cool things. Shaun gave a sneak peek of the rebuilt labs.blackbaud.com using BBNC Universal. And a couple of more things that we've posted. Just a ton of information covered. (My brain hurts.)

I finished up the day with a presentation of "The Power of TrueCRM: Unleashing Integrated Online and Offline Strategies to Get Results" which is a presentation I've been refining over the past year. I was really glad that people asked questions related to other concepts and ideas they've picked up throughout the conference.

The day ended with getting an opportunity to show Blackbaud NetCommunity Universal to some Canadian and International consultants. I think we got a very positive response. Not only is there a huge need in North America for a multi-channel solution but in Europe as well.

Montréal was a great place to hold the conference and I'm already looking forward to next year's event. Au revior!

(Updating Regularly)