Hello All.

I am involved in a situation that requires a group of people to make some decisions that should probably be being made by people with much more knowledge of the subject, but there really isn't anyone else in the organization who knows any more that we do, and our organization isn't in the position to be able to hire a consultant. We are attempting to learn as much as we can on our own in an attempt to do our honest best for our organization.

Basically, we are volunteers for a non-profit organization that uses an association management company (AMC.) A group of us volunteers has been tasked with finding a company to redesign our web site. Currently our web site is integrated with a particular association management software (AMS) package. Our AMC has made the decision to change to a different AMS package. This change will not take place for another 1 to 2 years. We are concerned that if we redesign the web site now, there will be another large cost to change the new web site to integrate with the new AMS.

Both the current AMS and the AMS that will be used in the future by our AMC seem to be professional software packages written by well qualified companies.

The generic question: Do most software companies that write AMS use any kind of industry standard for their API's?

We know that the new AMS claims that they use "well-defined" API's. We don't have enough familiarity with all the AMS packages to know whether they are like everyone else (i.e. use their own propriety data interchange methods) seems to be.

Is there any kind of "ball park" way to determine how much is involved in changing a web site that is integrated with one AMS to integrate with another AMS? Or is it impossible to say?

This is just a starting point for us, and we will probably, at some point, get an answer from our AMC, but they have been slow to respond and we are trying to at least start to lay the foundation for some of our decision making.

If you need me to be more specific, I probably can be a little bit.

Thanks for any insight you may have.

Tom