Slashdot Mirror
Customer Resource Management For Non-Profits?
NoTerminal writes "My 60-person non-profit organization is looking for a tool or set of tools to keep track of our donors and contacts. A perfect solution will either replace or gracefully synchronize with Outlook's contacts module, as well as provide a powerful back-end that can handle donation tracking, grant reporting, and interaction tracking. What contact management system or customer relations management package is your non-profit using? How do you like it?"
You laugh, but for a small business, backups are tough. Some "enterprise" software that is vital to their business for example, will depend on registry keys, services, processes set up to run as a particular user with particular rights, etc. I've dealt with these situations, and setting up a "reasonable" backup solution on a budget is extraordinarily more complex when you're talking about software that is vital to their business.
And in this case, excel is great because it's one file. If they copy it, burn it, put it somewhere, they KNOW it's backed up. It's there. Same goes for TXT. They can test it by taking their one file and opening it up on another machine. Does it work? Yes. It's there.
But for more complicated software, holy crap. One solution I came up for an anonymous small business whose computers were stolen was to replace all their desktops with Virtualbox VMs, set every client and the server to save state, copy all the Virtualbox files to a second folder, and then resume state at 3:00AM. For a backup, I have a batch file on the autorun list for a couple eSATA/USB2 hard drives that they can plug in, click "copy back up" and then it's done in a few minutes to half an hour. They can take the hard drive home. They can do it any time during the day on at least one client and the server.
But frankly, everything else I've seen is that "enterprise" and "business" software is so mind-bogglingly poorly written that unless backing up is an option of the program, and sometimes (in my case) even if it's an option, you'll be regretting not coming up with a sane, easy, fast, painless backup solution right off the bat.
And that's why excel files, txt files, anything that minimizes the filesystem footprint, is awesome. In my case, I had to wrap their business software in a VM.