The Not for Profit (NFP) sector faces many unique challenges in choosing and providing technical solution to their everyday, and often complex, processes. Financial pressures are often at the core of many of these hurdles but so too is external appreciation from suppliers that the NFP sector is unique - not only in its requirements but also in its approach to technology.

Charitable organisations often operate on shoestring budgets, stretching resources (both personnel and facilities) to their limits, educational institutions have wide remits spanning sprawling user groups, whilst government departments have exacting standards to meet alongside legacy and integration points.

Opensource technologies offer an unique opportunity for NFPs to get best of breed software for a fraction of the price of commercial packages, yet also benefit from commercial support that will satisfy board level standards. With upfront costs and TCO often prohibitive in advancing the technology within NFP’s this model deserves serious consideration.

In my experience within the NFP sector, many commercial implementations became financial blackholes when, after some years, the organisational needs and the supplier directions began to diverge. The off-the-shelf packages were often not agile or adaptable enough, within budget constraints, and the organisations behind them were understandably focused on high value clients.

In migrating to Opensource solutions, there was a new level of freedom in product flexibility and the potential to aid in the direction of the product itself. The board level concerns over ‘free software’ were quickly reversed when the short and longer term TCO were seen alongside reduced organisation risk. The threat of vendor lock-in became nonexistent and integration came with options rather than large price tags.

With the demands for document management, workflow, records and content management as real in the NFP sector as in any other, Alfresco offers an appealing out of the box functionality that can be tried and used for free! As the importance and impact of Alfresco begin to be realised, commercial support, guarantees and development can be employed to bed the product into the very core of the data processing and management of any NFP.