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President Bush now has a handful of online avatars that don't like him either. That can't help the approval rating! On January 29, 2006, it seems that a small cadre of Second Life users "marched" on "Washington", and were successful in crashing a part of Second Life and getting interviewed by BBC News. Oh, and getting blog attention from people like me. My quandary is this: if my real life is as hectic as it's going to get (something I say every Monday), how in the world am I going to keep up with my avatar's life in a second reality? Even more important, should I care?
Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp. Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we've dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn't closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we're nearing that limit.
While it's too early to understand the ramifications of this for the companies' clients and the sector as a whole, I'm rather confident that this will likely be just the beginning of a year of mergers and acquisitions in the sector. From the letter: I'm writing to share the exciting news that GetActive is to be acquired by Convio, Inc. This is a significant milestone for the nonprofit sector, our company, and our product. But most important of all, this is great news for our partners and clients. I predicted the consolidation of the marketplace last year, but I didn't think these two big hitters would be the happy couple we see today. See the full letter after the jump.
Tomorrow I'll be attending a few sessions at the Googleplex, led by Joomla team members including Louis Landry, Wilco Jansen, Hannes Papenberg and Laurens Vandeput. Their Google guide for the trip, Leslie Hawthorn, is a wonderful mix of open source developer mom and supporter of everything that leads to happy developers. She's even talked about the great open source speakers series that they're having a Google these days, including our Joomla devs. Throughout tomorrow I'll do my best to post updates to the blog, including some video and photos of the talks. I'll also make sure to provide fully detailed reports on the Google cafeteria food, which I promise to eat until fully stuffed. (Photos and video after the page flip...)
Yesterday I had great meeting with Meghan Nesbit of the Salesforce.com Foundation at their offices in downtown SF. We chatted about a variety of items, including the impact that Salesforce is having in the non-profit community, with well more than 1,000 licenses of their non-profit version of Salesforce distributed for free to organizations across the US. Even better, these non-profit users get the same standard support paying Salesforce corporate users receive. I also learned about a vibrant non-profit Salesforce user community that bubbles up in three different places:
When I had a chance to demo what we've already put together for J!Salesforce, Meghan seemed pretty happy with the results, and seemed especially in tune with some of the trickiness to the integration on items such as multi-select boxes. Her comments were a nice pat on the back of Kevin's tireless work over the past few weeks, and sparked a fire under our feet to keep the ball rolling.
Now that all your thank you messages are pointed in the right direction, let me give an update as to what Kevin's got cooking. Two days ago we were successfully able to push/pull data to/from Joomla and Salesforce. This means that we can now display data from Salesforce directly in Joomla, and then edit that data via forms in Joomla back into Salesforce. It all happens rather quickly, which is a little surprising since the data has to go back and forth between two servers in completely different parts of the US. Dynamic display of layout features Today Kevin just hit another major milestone. Now we're able to bring in form fields from Salesforce following the layout rules prescribed within Salesforce. For instance, say in your Salesforce layout you have a dropdown list for a contact's suffix. Now without any hassle you can have Joomla directly display that dropdown populated properly from Salesforce. Pretty darn cool. |
Just when I finally figured out how to get off 
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In what will likely be the email heard round the NPO tech world, we just received a partner email from GetActive that states the following announcement: Convio is buying GetActive.
Sometimes your schedule changes, and you've got to rearrange a meeting. Then sometimes you get invited to have lunch and go to Joomla presentations by core team members to a Google developer audience and your day completely changes.
In our efforts to go beyond just the nuts and bolts of bridging the gap between CRM and CMS applications, PICnet has kicked off our community building effort for 
First, I need to point out to the world that I am simply the messenger of all this wonderful news we have about the 
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