Peter Campbell, Techcafeteria, and Laura Quinn, Idealware

Repeat this mantra: I will not pay a vendor to lock me out of my own data. Sadly, this is what a lot of data management systems do, either by maintaining poor reporting and exporting interfaces or by including license clauses that void the contract if you interact with your data in unapproved ways.

The software you choose has an enormous impact on whether you can effectively get data in or pull it out to integrate with other packages. If you only look at the front end features, you're only conducting half an evaluation. It's also critical to determine how you can -- or if you can -- access the data.

To avoid lock-in and ensure the greatest amount of flexibility when looking to buy any new application -- particularly the ones that store your data off-site and give you web-based access to it -- ask the following questions:

Last fall, NTEN hosted a discussion amongst some of the major vendors in about Open APIs, one of the major pieces of the data integration puzzle. One year later -- almost to the day! -- two major vendors have announced major initiatives around Open APIs. Coincidence? We think not!

Last week, Kintera announced the expansion of their Connect program, adding APIs to their library of tools.

The latest announcement is from Convio, which today launches Convio Open. The site addresses data integration in three ways: APIs, Connectors, and Extensions. It's a much deeper set of tools than what we've seen before, and the site provides integration resources for organizations with a variety of integration needs, including a FaceBook integration.

Who's next?

An enthusiastic "Heck Yeah!" for the recent CNET Blog Post: "Should "open source" include open data?" In the post, author Matt Asay says:

I'm not speaking for the Open Source Initiative here, but to me this makes it critical to add open data provisions to the Open Source Definition. Why? Because open source that locks down one's data is not all that open, in the grand scheme of things.

Amen! But let's take it a step further. There are several big pieces to the vendor lock-in puzzle, and none of them are the exclusive domain of open source solutions.