2009 NTEN Follow Up
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In late April, ifPeople attended the 2009 NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. The two-day conference was attended by 1,450 representatives from various organizations and businesses around the world. The event focused broadly on ways nonprofits can use technology to elicit social change, but this year most presentations concerned exciting developments in open source software and social media, along with the fundamental best practices. Online buzz around the conference was incredible. (#09NTEN was the second most popular hashtag on Twitter, right behind the swine flu!)
During NTEN's Science Fair portion of the conference, ifPeople co-founder Chris Johnson helped run the Plone booth, giving nonprofits valuable information on the CMS that has helped countless ifPeople clients create and manage cost-effective websites. He also gave a presentation on the advantage of integrating Plone with salesforce.com, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that helps businesses track leads and stay in contact with clients. Over 5,000 nonprofit organizations have flocked to the service because the Foundation offers free licenses to nonprofits and discounted rates to socially responsible businesses.
This use of salesforce.com has also sparked new interest in Plone because the two tools integrate with each other so well. Thanks to organizations like One/Northwest, ifPeople, and independent open source developers, salesforce.com is more tightly integrated with Plone than any other CMS. There are five main advantages to the integration:
- toolkits that provide the basic information exchange between Plone and Salesforce.com
- an auth plug-in that allows credential checking, caching of user data, and syncing of data from Salesforce.com and Plone
- an integration of PloneFormGen with Salesforce.com for web-to-lead forms, etc.
- an event management product that connects with Salesforce.com
- an ecommerce integration.
You can read about how Plone with e-commerce integrates with Salesforce here , or how Plone with Salsa integrates with salesforce.com here.
Check out the Plone-Salesforce presentation Chris gave at NTEN with Jon and Steve (ONE/Northwest) below.
Open Civic Engagement Platform: Plone, Salesforce and Friends
