Even though office scanners have only been around since the early 1990s, when they were aimed (and priced) mostly for the business market, in just a little over a decade the devices have become nearly ubiquitous, either as stand-alone devices, or built in to all-in-one printer/scanning/faxing devices. Read more...

Dozens of applications that enable nonprofits to track constituents and perform routine fundraising chores are available. Solutions can be as simple as a combination of an off-the-shelf email program and Microsoft Excel, or as complex as large-scale, customizable programs that can help you manage the details of thousands of relationships.

Over the past few years, the most visible, and probably the most significant, new trend in constituent management software is that there are now many Web-based applications. These provide many advantage over locally-hosted applications, but aren't the answer for everyone.

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The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer organization, maintains, on its Web site, a chronology of U.S. data breaches. The list, which the organization began in January 2005, provides the basic details of hundreds of breaches in the for-profit, government, educational, and non-profit (charitable) sectors; breaches are common enough that the list is updated twice a week. The total number of records containing sensitive data that have been involved -- again, this is just in the U.S., and just in three years -- 252,276,766. Read more...