In the last year, the Interlochen Center for the Arts has moved from an antique on-premise ERP/ CRM solution to two cloudy offerings: Enrollment Rx for admissions to both our summer camp and arts academy, and Convio Common Ground for our advancement and fundraising department. Both of these solutions reside on the Salesforce.com platform, a delivery model that is providing significant financial and time savings for our IT organization along with process improvements for our business units. Interlochen has also migrated away from on-premise Microsoft Exchange and adopted Google Apps for Education, which provides email, document collaboration, enterprise calendaring, and instant messaging.

At the 2011 Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference (April 16th in Grand Rapids), I’ll provide an overview of how these efforts to move to the cloud have benefited our institution and, just as importantly, outline the challenges we overcame in an effort to save others the same heartaches — or to at least prepare them for similar challenges.

Please come join me for a great day of learning and networking. The Starbucks is on me!