ubuntu-ngo team mailing list archive

[Alan Bell <alan.bell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Laura Czajkowski wrote:
> Aloha, 
>
> I talked to  Mark A. Hershberger during the NGO interview series and he has
> coe back with some good thoughts which I thought would be good to share
> here, perhaps working on them as a group, or at UDS. 
>
> Laura 
>
>   
These are interesting points, I don't think he is wrong about any of
them, however better office integration with proprietary alternatives
and managing multiple computers are fairly normal pain points for the
generic Acme Widgets type business.
The office suite improvements are really an upstream issue and there are
events like the ODF plugfest which is going on right now
http://www.odfworkshop.nl/ but they are things that benefit everyone
equally, not specially the charitable sector. Would it be possible to go
back to him and ask if there are issues he has specifically because of
the type of organisation it is, that are not being asked for by the rest
of the community. If you look at the vtiger CRM package (does stuff for
the sales team of a typical trading organisation) and then CiviCRM you
will see that the feature list of CiviCRM is totally different and
covers things like donor management, memberships, events etc. If you
asked a business and an NGO to design a CRM system they would come up
with vtiger and CiviCRM respectively. If you asked them to design an
office application they would both come up with OpenOffice.org.

Alan.