I got this note today from Brett Meyer at NTEN. If any of you ahve a few minutes to spare, please take the survey!

Hi, Blackbusers,

NTEN's currently running a Vendor Satisfaction Survey on Content Management Systems, and Blackbaud's NetCommunity is one of the listed options.  But we're still a few responses short from being able to include Blackbaud in the final report.

The survey focuses on Nonprofits' use of CMS, so if you could give it a little mention and get us over the hump, we'd greatly appreciate it.  We're closing it on May 1st.

The survey is at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ddGT2SlB7Pj9zIBXWW5R4Q_3d_3d

and you can find more information at:

http://nten.org/blog/2008/04/08/hot-or-not-rank-your-cms-vendor

Thanks for any assistance you can give us,

Brett Meyer
Communications and Web Manager
NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

Over the coming months we'll be featuring guest articles from a diverse group of writers, bloggers, and Blackbus members. Thanks to Garrett Keating for guest posting today! If you'd like to write an article and get your blog or website featured, drop us a line!

I received a press release from Blackbaud today about Blackbaud NetCommunity Universal, formally Scorpio for those of you that have been following this. It's a new product based on their Infinity platform, a totally database agnostic application that makes use of an open web services API for integration and some pretty unique KPI reports.

This gets really interesting when you start to consider that this is the route the NetCommunity will go shortly.  The open web services API makes creating custom parts much easier than it has in the past, especially for those of you that are hosted clients with Blackbaud.

The KPI reports are also interesting but what I think is even more important is the ability to publish those reports via RSS. Now, regularly used reports can be dynamically created and published via RSS right to your website or new reader. Powerful stuff and it's a shift to a much more Web 2.0 approach in Blackbaud products.

I think this product is targeted to a unique group of Blackbaud clients that want a simple web solution for some core online functions. It's very similar to NetSolutions but with some obvious improvements. I think where the average Blackbaud client benefits is from the web services API and KPI reports that will also be in the new Infinity version of NetCommunity. Customization is the best way to get the most out of NetCommunity. With things like Labs, the Wiki, Blackbus.org and other developer resources that are quickly growing it's becoming even easier to make NetCommunity work the way you need it to. NetCommunity Universal is forerunner to the next version of NetCommunity.

Read the full press release here…

Purple Cow? A who what now?

A purple cow is a term coined by Seth Godin that describes an idea, product, or service that is remarkable - as in something that is worth making a remark about. The Blackbus does not advertise. We do not actively recruit people from elsewhere on the webbernet. People come here because someone they trust passed along the URL.

We are here in a group of almost 2000 people who believe that what we are doing is worth their time and attention. You are reading this because you trust what you have helped to build. Through surveys, polls, email feedback and general discussion we are getting a much clearer picture of why this small group of rebels has done so well and what will help it to be successful going forward: we provide a legitimate alternative to some of the services that Blackbaud offers and a voice for the clients that has not existed before.

For coming on two years we have worked together to get the most out of our Blackbaud products because we felt that what Blackbaud was telling us and giving us was not enough. A need was present and we have done our best to fill it.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for participating. Thank you for telling your friends or co-workers about the site. It makes a difference.

Going forward we are going to continue to build on what works, trim away what doesn't and introduce new ideas and tools to help you get the most out of your investment with Blackbaud. Some of these new ideas will work and some will fall flat. It will be a lot of fun trying these things out and we welcome all your thoughts and feedback on what we try to build here.

Things to look for over the rest of 2008:

• more articles from guest bloggers
• more professional ideas and input from the rich consulting community build around RE and Blackbaud products
• contests (maybe even prizes!)
• a strong presence at the Charleston conference in November.

What we need from you

• Participation! Post in the forums. Even if you think what you want to contribute isn't worth it you are wrong. All points of view are valid and welcome. Often it's the crazy ideas and suggestions that go the farthest.
• Tell your friends! If you know of someone you work with or someone from another org that uses a Blackbaud product who isn;t a member, tell them about us. If you participate in the offical forum consider putting a link to Blackbus in your signature.
• Challenge Blackbaud! If someone at customer support, your account manager, or anyone gives you an answer to a question that is not satisfactory, don't accept it and grumble later - call them on it and make sure that you are getting what you need.

As always, share your thoughts with us in the forum!

As many of you are aware Blackbaud is currently testing its fancy new forums. They are built using Community Server 2007 which is built on ASP.Net. Since they are a Microsoft shop that makes sense.

My take on the forums so far is that they capture a lot of the great things that we have adopted here, the prime example being listing which Blackbaud products you use. On Blackbus that appears beside every message you post.

The original idea for creating Blackbus.org was that the existing Blackbaud forums were not at all user friendly and vBulletin (the software we use) provides a much richer user interface and is arguably the best forum software in the world. Since they are moving to adopt a tool that closely resembles vBulletin and other products we are going to need to evolve ourselves.

Why does the Blackbaud User Society exist? What does it mean to you? When Blackbaud changes its forums over to the new format will you still come here?

We provide a valuable aternative to the official forums. We are not affiliated with Blackbaud and are not likely to become so. We have gone to great lengths to create a sense of community among Blackbaud clients that is seperate from Blackbaud. I don't think that can be replaced. I think that you all make this place what it is. For that I am grateful.

Tell us what Blackbus is to you. More importantly tell us what you think Blackbus.org should become as we move into another phase of our existence. Ultimately it is you who assign value to what we do here and we want this place to be as valuable as possible in helping you do your jobs better.

Please take a moment to reply to this post to share your thoughts on our future.

This week we are going to be making some changes to the site to clean things up a bit and help us focus on what we are best at. Some forums will be deleted and some extra content that goes unused will also be removed. We can't be all things to all people and that attempt has made the site unmanagemeble to a large portion of our user base.

 As of today we have removed:

• Consulting forums
• 3rd party software and website forums.

Many more changes will be made once Blackbaud relaunches their new forums. We are not competing with them, but rather trying to offer and alternative and fill a need that they can't.

Your feedback on these changes and other you think should be made are essential. Please post your thoughts in this thread on what it is we do the best and should focus on. Is there something we aren't doing now that we should try?

Having access to an API is great if you wrote the thing. If not you need to be able to figure out how everything works by trial and error. Well those days are over for the BBNC API. This from Blackbaud Labs: 

In this screen cast we'll take a quick look at the NetCommunity Open API. Available since the original release of NetCommunity, this robust, mature API is being employed in production environments by many NetCommunity customers. In this screen cast we'll give a high level introduction to the API and since it's Blackbaud Labs, we'll attach the debugger and step through some code baby! Lastly, by popular demand, we'll reveal road map information on our plans for the NetCommunity API moving forward. As promised in the screen cast here is a link to the API wiki, which will serve as the community powered documentation resource for NetCommunity.

Watch the NetCommunity API Screen Cast (Flash format, 20 minutes)

Thanks very much to Shaun Sullivan for providing the news.

Well Happy New Year everyone!

The Blackbaud User Society's New Year's resolution is to make the site as easy to use and navigate as possible. This wil be the first in a weekly series of tips on how to get better use out of the Blackbus. First up - receiving forum updates via email. 

Yes it's true - you can interact with the Blackbaud User Society forums completely through email. There is many a holdover from the Yahoo Groups community who really love what Blackbus has to offer, but can't get past having to travel to the site, log in, locate a message, click reply, etc... You can avoid all this by receiveing notifications by email and replying to them via email.

To use this feature edit your group memberships, and join the group "Email Notification & Reply". This will subscribe you to every forum on the site. From there you can unsubscribe from the individual mailings you do not want to receive. While this tool does reduce our ad impressions and ultimately our meager revenue we feel it is more important to provide the service to you. If you use the notification service, please consider making a donation of $5 to the Blackbus.

If you have any questions about this feature please drop us a line! Please replace AT with @...