“Ongoing maintenance” for CiviCRM

What does it take to keep a CiviCRM system running well and continually meeting your needs?

We generally call this "ongoing maintenance," but that term needs to be defined, because it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

And that difference in understanding can create some problems. For example:

• If you sign up for a “managed hosting” service, what does that really include?

• If you’re just trying to set aside a reasonable budget of money and time to keep your CRM running properly, what areas should you be considering?

• Is it possible — or desirable — to outsource all of these things to an external service provider? Can you — and should you — increase efficiency by handling some of it in-house? Is that even an option?

Over the next few days, we’ll be looking into different aspects of this topic to help tease apart each one. What it is, why it’s important, and who you can look to for making it happen.

Some areas we’ll be looking at:

• Hosting and infrastructure

• Security updates

• Non-security updates

• System configuration

• Feature improvements

• Custom visual design

We’ll talk about which of these you can (or even should) expect to handle in-house, and which are good candidates for outsourcing, and even some steps you can take to make sure you’re not assigning tasks to folks that are over- or under-qualified for the work.

Tune in tomorrow for a brief discussion of that first item: hosting and infrastucture.

All the best,
Allen