I've been on upgrade planning calls with about a dozen organizations in the last few weeks, and several have asked about putting Patron Edge in a virtual environment. Three questions have come up repeatedly and I want to address them and give some food for thought when planning your next server hardware purchase.
Will it work? - The Patron Edge Quality Assurance team and several members of our Support team use VMWare to test multiple versions of PE at once, and it works perfectly. Keep in mind this is for the server side of things. While a virtualization solution will do fine on workstations as far as the program is concerned, I can't guarantee that your printers/scanners/card swipes will work flawlessly.
Is it slow? - In-house, I haven't seen a performance difference between a physical server and a virtual server with the same system specs. Several organizations currently use VirtualBox or VMWare because they can buy extremely fast servers and then split resources over several virtual machines. The bottleneck of a virtual machine setup is the hard disk, so be sure to read up on best practices to keep your virtual machines running as fast as possible.
Is it supported? - Server-side, it's absolutely supported as long as the virtual machine meets our system requirements. Currently, at least one organization has a fully-loaded server with a fast Linux distribution installed. They put Patron Edge and their other enterprise programs on virtual servers.
Supportability is only an issue is on the workstation side, and that is because we don't test peripherals on virtual machines. I have seen a Macbook, with a Datamax printer connected, running Patron Edge through VMWare Fusion and printing tickets without any issues. But if the printer didn't work in that setup, my Support team wouldn't be able to assist since we don't have that kind of computer hardware and it wasn't verified as working by the Quality Assurance team.
What other questions do you have about putting your Blackbaud products in a virtual environment? Have you been doing it for a while at your own organization? Leave a note for others in the comments.
I'm about six months into my own nonprofit arts organization (parkcirclefilms.org) and am always looking for ways to work smarter and automate repetitive tasks. I wanted to share two excellent tools I've implemented to manage the administrative stuff so I can focus on our mission.
TWiki
TWiki is a really cool, open source wiki and collaboration system. It can be a bear to install, but the wiki engine is powerful and it sports awesome features like:
Project management and project development - Your IT staff can use it for coordinating on website or report development, and the marketing folks can use it to collaborate on your next big campaign.
Knowledge management - As my organization grows, more
volunteers have started getting involved. To keep the learning curve
low, volunteers are given a login to TWiki that gives them access to
our Policies and Procedures web and other pertinent information. Things
they shouldn't be allowed to read are kept private via group security.
Document management - This was what caught my eye first. We have meeting minutes, image files and other documents that I need to share easily and securely. Google Docs was my first attempt, but it lacks version control and you can only do text documents and spreadsheets. TWiki is good for keeping track of documents, and keeping them organized in a way that makes sense (because the file name "mrkt_sum_09_letter_stats.xls" won't make any sense in two months).
If it's good enough for Yahoo!, Cingular and SAP, I figured it was worth a shot, and I'm not disappointed at all. This is a great product that will scale into a nice intranet as we continue to grow.
Wordpress
Wordpress is the best blogging platform currently available. It's free and open source, and has hundreds of great plugins to extend it. We didn't need a full content management system, so this was a way to build a decent-looking web presence in just a couple of days. Creating and editing content is simple, so if I'm unavailable and we need a piece of information added to the website, I've got four non-techy people who can do it without breaking a sweat. I'm even testing out an event calendar plugin to let people more easily see our upcoming film schedule.
If you're not using Patron Edge Online for your web presence or to sell tickets, I highly recommend checking out Wordpress, or even Drupal if you need a full-featured content management system without paying full-time web developers to build and maintain a custom website.
What tools do you use at your organization to automate back office tasks or keep things flowing smoothly on the administrative side? Share your experience in the comments.