Sage Fundraising 50
The new release of Sage's all-in-one nonprofit fundraising solution has not just been renamed - it was formerly MIP Fundraising Paradigm - it has been significantly enhanced, with new modules for recurring gifts and for processing online gifts, as well as a number of ease-of-use improvements, expanded e-mail tools for communicating with donors, and extensive user guides. The online gift-processing module automates and streamlines the process of consolidating online donations and data, preventing data entry errors, while the recurring gift module helps users quickly process bank drafts and credit card gifts.
Price: Contact vendor.
Sage Software
www.sagenonprofit.com
WordPerfect strikes back
If you think of Microsoft as the Evil Empire (and some people actually do), you can take comfort from the fact that there are alternatives to its products, which often seem to dominate whole categories the way the Death Star dominates solar systems. Among these alternatives are Corel's WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition - a sort of Rebel Alliance against Microsoft's Office suite that's built around the classic word-processing program WordPerfect (now that's a name we haven't heard in a long, long time).
WordPerfect never went away, so it can't have a Jedi-like return, but the most recent release of its suite is specifically designed for small businesses in terms of pricing, ease of use and its task-oriented approach, and it does include a number of new features, particularly a new e-mail application that can let small business users avoid the expense of mail server infrastructure.
Plus, the suite comes with a Task Manager, the Quattro Pro 12 spreadsheet application, a PowerPoint-compatible presentation application, Norton Internet Security, and more.
Price: Upgrade - $179; new - $349. Some components available for 30-day trial download.
Corel Corp.
www.wordperfect.com
Cartesis Planning 4.1
Following the acquisition of business planning and forecasting software vendor INEA, Cartesis has released that company's planning solution as Cartesis Planning 4.1.
The application offers real-time forecasting and what-if scenario analysis, with built-in financial intelligence, collaboration and analysis tools, and sophisticated process workflow and control. Planning 4.1 integrates with Cartesis' financial consolidation and management reporting application, ES Magnitude.
Price: Contact vendor.
Cartesis Group
www.cartesis.com
Back-up software
Since we have now lost the Word file of this column four times, we are big fans of back-up software such as Genie-Soft's Genie Backup Manager Pro, the latest version of which was recently released.
GBM 6.0 has a number of improvements and enhancements, including the ability to run scheduled back-up tasks while Windows is logged off, ensuring more security; a multi-drive- spanning feature to back up data on to more than one local or LAN station; and a free plug-ins search and download option, which lets users search for free back-up plug-ins on Genie-Soft's Web site, and then download and add them in a one-click process.
Price: $70.
Genie-Soft
www.genie-soft.com
(962) 6-5167234
