On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Thomas Phelan <tphelan@peddie.org> wrote:
> I'm at the Blackbaud conference and attended most of the tech-track
> sessions
> including a tech roadmap session given by Shaun Sullivan Blackbaud's
> CTO. Below is my summary of the most important things said about version 8
> and the infinity platform.
>
> First, version 8 is often referred to as infinity but it is easy to get
> confused with the naming. Infinity is really an underlying platform upon
> which the various version 8 applications are built. The infinity platform
> itself is in use as we speak running some current Blackbaud products.
>
> In version 8 the client is history. Version 8 apps will be browser-based
> and
> BB maintains it will run in any modern browser needing only HTML5 and
> javascript. No SilverPoint, Flash, ActiveX, etc. The RE8 pages he showed
> looked good and the speed was impressive; looks like they are not allowing
> the Faculty Access/NetClassroom programmers anywhere near version 8! If the
> live system works anything like what I saw, then I'll be happy. Dumping the
> client is of course great news for any Mac schools that have Windows
> clients
> merely to be able to run Blackbaud. This is a relatively recent change
> (less
> than a year). Recall that the previous roadmap was to keep the client but
> build a web services layer between the client and the database.
>
> Blackbaud's mobile strategy is to create HTML5 compliant pages rather than
> build custom mobile apps for each mobile platform. No surprises here. I
> think Google is ultimately going to do the same thing with Google Apps and,
> for example, will eventually get rid of the GMail mobile platform specific
> apps. Unless custom mobile apps are absolutely essential (e.g. because they
> have to access hardware in an advanced way) it just makes much more sense
> to
> focus development time building one browser based web app rather then
> spending time maintaining custom mobile apps for iPhone, Android,
> Blackberry, Symbian, etc. Some interesting customizations I saw is the
> ability to create mobile web pages based on queries. For example, if you
> create a student query showing selected fields you could then deploy the
> results of the query as a mobile page.
>
> Now for the thing that I found most surprising. While Blackbaud is open to
> changing depending on client requests (uproar?), they currently plan to
> require RE8 (and FE8/EE8 when released) to be hosted in the cloud. As of
> today, there is no plan to provide an option to install version 8 on
> servers
> in our server rooms. This will have profound implications for those of us
> who have built outside the box solutions by reading data directly from SQL
> Server as no direct database access will be possible. Anything we have
> built
> will have to either be recreated inside of the applications using the
> significantly enhanced customization options rewritten to pull data from a
> cloud based web service rather than from a locally hosted database. If
> Blackbaud does this right and properly documents their programming tools (a
> big "if") then this means a lot of work but ultimately it means the
> ability
> to build much more robust custom applications that can actually do things
> rather than our current custom apps that are pretty much limited to
> displaying data stored in BB.
>
> When I asked how far FE8/EE8 was behind RE8 he said FE8/EE8 would follow
> the
> release of RE8 much closer than they have historically. The reason, and
> this
> is the most positive thing I've heard in this conference, is that
> Blackbaud's model of building FE/EE based on RE and then forking the
> products is no longer their model. FE/EE are being developed at the same
> time (although of course RE continues to lead the way) on the infinity
> platform they will remain on the same infinity platform rather than
> forking.
> The long term implication of this should be that FE/EE should not lag so
> far
> behind RE in the future. At this point you may have guessed that this
> convergence means there will no longer be two databases, just one holding
> data for all Blackbaud products. However, given that we will no longer have
> direct access to the database and won't have local SQL Servers this is
> really a moot point. Also not surprisingly, for schools using the whole
> suite, Sullivan recommends not upgrading RE8 immediately after it is
> released. Instead, he recommends waiting until all version 8 products
> (RE/FE/EE) are released and upgrading at the same time or as closely
> together as we have resources to accomplish. Given the major changes this
> makes sense, but the prospect of upgrading nearly simultaneously is
> daunting. Do I hear any volunteers to go first? ;)
>
> Overall, I'm encouraged by what I have heard, but find it troubling that
> Blackbaud is still not ready to commit to a release date for RE8. However,
> the new platform looks too mature for Blackbaud to make any more major
> changes (e.g. like their abandoning of the client about a year ago) so I am
> hopeful that we will hear something firm about a release date reasonably
> soon. My prediction is that RE8 will be available in about a year with
> FE/EE
> following 12-18 mo later and ultimately that we'll be migrating RE/FE/EE in
> the summer of 2013 or 2014.
>
> Of course, no matter how good the new platform turns out to be, when it
> comes to running our schools everything depends on how well they use the
> platform to build tools we need that work the way we need them to work, and
> how much flexibility we have to customize the product to match the unique
> ways each of our individual schools do things. To do this they need to
> listen to their education customers and Blackbaud's record in this respect
> is mixed at best.
>
> Tom Phelan
> Peddie School
>
> [ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874]
> Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution,
> non-commercial, share-alike license.
> RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
>
--
Norman Constantine
Director of Technology Integration
Wakefield School
The Plains, VA
[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874 ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
