Open APIs and Nonprofit Software -- Is 2007 the year?

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 9:00am.

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Following up on the NTEN Open API Debate last fall, we are publishing a White Paper that gives an overview of what open APIs are, what they do, why software buyers in the nonprofit market should care about them, and where some of the major vendors in the space are at in regard to opening up their APIs.

So, we figured we ASK them. Here are our questions, directed at key contact at each of the vendors:

1. Does your product have APIs that allow other applications to access data from your application?

2. Do you have features that call APIs of other applications?

3. If your application has APIs, what are the technologies used by those APIs? Please give a detailed technical overview.

4. We define an 'open API' as one that is documented, accessible to the audience it is intended for, and there is no additional cost to access it. Are your APIs open, as we've defined it?

5. If they are not open according to this definition, please explain.

6. Is there documentation online? (if yes, please include the link)

7. If you don't have APIs in your applications yet, do you plan to implement them sometime in the next year?

8. If so, when will they be released?

9. Will they be open, according to above definition?

For the purposes of the paper, we are focusing on a small slice of the market -- primarily fudraising and CRM software vendors. Here is WHO we asked, in random order. These include both hosted and non-hosted application vendors.