Comments on: NTEN Open API Discussion

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 23:22:14 +0000

Thanks Katrin, you flatter…

Great call. Thanks for hosting it–I know the work that goes into such things! Data access via an API is really cool when it’s your own high-value data and it’s really cool when it’s someone else’s high-value data. Just taking data from print to an API accessible form can really blow the doors off…

By: Katrin

Katrin — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 22:39:44 +0000

Steve – thanks for this. I guess we were not entirely clear in our billing that we are indeed talking about webservices APIs connceting tools. But that is precisely what that was about… and the call was to indicate that vendors indeed need to listen to what customers want. The biggest shared pain across nonprofits is the data silos that everyone maintains at great cost of time and money. So, thanks for clarifying this so eloquently. Should have had you involved in the planning of this Incidentally, I just talked to the folks at the Institute for Money in State Politics and they are – yep, opening up their APIs.. to “give outside Web-site developers the ability to access and display the Institute’s data on their own Web sites, to program fully interactive displays using Institute data within their Web pages, and to create applications that return live data from http://www.followthemoney.org”

What goes for the vendor goed for the nonprofit keepers of valuable data (and databases) just as much…

Thanks again, Steve, for all the great work that you do. You are a fabulous leader in the community!

Katrin

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 03:44:52 +0000

Steve, it looks like you kept this post vendor-agnostic, and I know the Quickbooks is just one example, but it was wierd that I stumbled across this post only a few minutes after reading yours:

http://blogs.salesforce.com/dreamforce06/2006/09/integrating_sal.html

Interesting overlap of topics?