Abstract
During the planning phase for its multi-billion-dollar fundraising campaign, Harvard University recognized the importance of information technology to the campaign's success. The University is implementing a fundraising management system on a relational database, accessed by desktop systems using client/server technology. The project, known as SOLAR, is an interactive fundraising system designed to provide fundraising management and personnel the capability to access and share management summary and prospect information, such as automatic summary charts, prospect tracking, research, events and so forth.University management is able to view, from the desktop, up-to-date campaign status information in the form of charts from a wide variety of views such as: goal versus actual charts by University, School, theme, program, fundraiser, class, geographical area, etc. These charts may be selected by a wide variety of possible views. For example, the President may desire to see how a school is progressing within the health theme while the Director of Development may need to analyze how a class is proceeding with the technology theme. These charts are also available in reports that may be viewed on the desktop display and/or printed to a report. All charts may be cut and pasted to wordprocessing documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.The presentation will consist of a brief background description, a live demonstration/walk-through of the system, a description of the technical architecture, and lessons that we learned that may help the audience with their own client/server projects--in other words, what mistakes we made along the way.