The next NOSI/NTEN webinar will be on CiviCRM, and will be conducted by the CiviCRM development team. They will give an overview of CiviCRM, examples of its use, and there will be lots of time for questions. Register on the NTEN Site. More details about the webinar are on the CiviCRM blog.

There are a surprising number of open source tools for CRM and fundraising.The NTEN CRM satisfaction survey showed that people who were surveyed were quite satisfied with the free and open source tools that many of them have chosen to implement. This webinar will be an overview of free and open source CRM tools.

We've finalized the report on the survey we did early last month. There are some interesting results, and it is worth a read. The summary:

NOSI and NTEN are presenting the second in our series of webinars on Open Source software, on OpenOffice.org.Although Microsoft Office seems to be the de facto standard for office suites, OpenOffice.org is a free and open source office suite with the same (and in some ways more) functionality as most of MS Office, will read and write MS Office file formats, and has a native file format that is an open standard, which protects data integrity and access forever.

To this day, technology in the translation industry has been largely dominated by a handful of proprietary applications.Linguas OS is a Linux distribution created specifically for professionals in the translation industry, including Free Open Source Software tools to perform all of the tasks that professional translators must do every day in their work.The tools Linguas OS provides include: * OpenOffice office suite for creation and manipulation of all major office file formats (including those generated by MSOffice products), * OmegaT, a Computer Aided Translation (CAT) program for c

FLOSSMetrics, with funding from the European Union, has just published a guide on FLOSS use by small business.It covers much of the same ground as NOSI's own Primer, but with maybe a few more stats and quotes, including:- what is free/libre/opens ource software- ten myths- selecting software- adoption strategies- business modelsIt comes with an accompanying Catalog which reviews dozens of software packages in the following categories:- Infrastructural software- ERP/CRM- Groupware- Document management- Content management systems- VoIP, conferencing and

NTEN and NOSI are co-sponsoring a series of webinars all year this year. There will be one webinar a month, covering topics from how to get support for FOSS, highlights of specific FOSS projects like Joomla and CiviCRM, how to migrate to FOSS platforms, etc. The full series description is on the NTEN site .As the webinars happen, we will be posting the presentations here (in Open Document Format, and PDF).

For those of you who are IRC aficionados, I've been hanging out at the #nosi channel on irc.freenode.net. Freenode is where most FOSS projects that use IRC have their channels. So, why not NOSI?See you there.

NOSI took part in the Managing Nonprofit Technology Projects event that was co-sponsored by Aspiration and Idealware. A good time was had by all at this awesome event. One of the outcomes of the event was a software tool map of all of the varied tools that people used for varied parts of project management. We've taken a subset of those tools (the FOSS tools, of course) and created a toolkit.

Becta, the UK education technology agency, has published a key report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. It covers document interoperability and analyses the suitability of both software packages for adoption by schools and colleges.It recommends that schools and colleges review the findings of the report before considering any large-scale investment or deployment, which are:The key recommendations from Becta's report are: