Keeping operating costs at a minimum is an important goal for most organizations – but for charities such as Osteoporosis Canada (OC), it’s absolutely critical. If a charity spends too much to keep itself running, donors give it a pass. That’s why the organization was pleased that it could cut a full-time network administrator – who was paid a salary of $35,000 a year – from its staff as a result of a switch to Microsoft from Novell products. The not-for-profit organization recently migrated to Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange Server and Outlook from Novell GroupWise 5.5 and NetWare.
The move was prompted by a number of factors, says OC president Karen Ormerod. First, there was her personal preference. She came from an organization that had a Windows environment, and preferred it to Novell’s. “I don’t like Novell GroupWise. I don’t find it terribly effective,” she said.
OC had also outsourced its database a number of years ago and as a result, anytime it needed information, it had to pay the outsourcing company to do a search. It decided to bring its donation data in-house and move to Raiser’s Edge, the industry standard software for tracking donations, as well as Financial Edge. Both applications were optimized to run with Windows. OC would have had to install a Windows server for the applications — which would have meant contending with a heterogeneous environment.