I’m super excited to announce the launch of Blackbaud Labs. Blackbaud Labs is maintained by our product development team. We’re using it as a place to post research projects, samples, crazy ideas and more.

We want to grant you unparalleled access to the torrent of new technology that we have been releasing since the first quarter of this year. We have spent 3 years completely rebuilding our technology stack from the ground up and we’re ready for the whole world to have a look.

Front and center is the Infinity, the Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform that powers two of our shipping products Blackbaud Enterprise CRM and Blackbaud Direct Marketing. We think it’s so cool we have posted a link on labs.blackbaud.com so anyone out there can take it for a test drive.

Expect to see a lot more on the labs. Oh, if you are a developer — stay tuned, we’re about to knock your socks off

Have fun!

We have been building our next generation application platform (code name Infinity) for almost two years now. I can’t talk in specifics at this point, but I can say that we have two brand new applications built on this platform ready to ship! Sorry, no dates will be revealed here, my friends.

Is that Linux? Yep.

So, as we exit one of the most intense R&D cycles in the 18 years I’ve been at Blackbaud, I took some time to reflect back on our initial goals for the platform and do a little internal report card of sorts around how I think we did. I won’t bore you with the details, or maybe I will in another post, but for now I’d like to look at one place where I give the team an A+.

You didn’t think I was going to blog about the “B” grade did you?

Goal: Embrace web standards to maximize interoperability

I know, it’s a mouthful, but I can’t figure out how to put it any more succinctly. Two years ago it was obvious to the team here that we needed to be web delivered and if we were going to be web delivered we should use as many standards-based technologies as possible.

(more…)

I’d love to see more folks taking advantage of our APIs. So, while driving home last night I thought to myself that it would be cool to start up a little open source API community where together we can post and modify samples in an open source format. So in just a few minutes today at lunch I was able to easily set up a Blackbaud community on Microsoft’s CodePlex.

I also uploaded a sample that demonstrates how to write a simple plugin using the Raiser’s Edge 7.81 and Visual Basic .NET 2005.
You can view the project page here.
(Note this sample will only work with RE 7.81 or later, since 7.81 ships with the required .NET 2.0 support files)

Did you know that Plugins do not require an API license to create? That’s right, grab this sample, play with it, make your own plugins and contribute them to the project/community! The only restriction I am making is I am putting all code under a Creative Commons License.

I’ll be up front with you, I probably won’t have much time to field direct questions on any code I post. Also, this isn’t officially suported Blackbaud product. That said, if you are looking for a place to learn more about using our extensive APIs and plugins, I hope this community will serve as a launch pad. I’ll upload more stuff when I get free time and inspiration. What I’d most like to see is what you come up with.

Now go buy that .NET book and start coding! Be sure to let me know if you’d like to contribute code or projects, I’ll add you to the open source team. Make something really cool and we may ask you to join the Blackbaud Product Development team

Shaun