Upgrade from RE 7.93 to 7.96

Tessa Klarin

We are going to be upgrading from RE 7.93 to 7.96 and I would love any words of advice on preparing our phones/emails, queries/export and staff for the change.  I am checking our data now to confirm all phones/emails are listed on our preferred address tab.  Should we delete all the duplicates that appear on other addresses before the switch or let them migrate over as inactive? Any recommendations would be much appreciated!  

Gina Gerhard

Tessa - Here are some notes I took on my phone/email cleanup when we upgraded to 7.95. Note this was just my specific approach, but there might be something useful for you here.


PREWORK:

• In the past, Blackbaud basically had this phone data shared across records or had you copy it to the next address – so there’s a lot of duplicate phone information out there.  Now, they want you to trim that down and have it in only one place. That’s a big shift.
• Just because you used to have this phone data on the records doesn’t mean it was ever very useful -- and now it’s perhaps out of date.  So you may use this as a chance to revisit this data and remove it if it’s no longer of use.

 

General:

• Identified the key records for cleanup (we have some types of records that are more transactional and not ‘long-term’.
  • Did not spend time cleaning these non-key records.
  • Also, if you miss some of records it’s not critical – this is just to minimize how the phones import in so things may be cleaner if you do these steps. But don’t panic if you miss some.
• All cleanup work was done MANUALLY  vs. using import.
  • In full disclosure, I couldn’t figure out how to create an export/import process to get all the phones to fix them.   Instead I was more comfortable doing this manually.
  • Although it did take time, this way I could also check for errors, miscategorizations, phone info that should have been copied over to the preferred address but wasn’t, etc. – and correct these issues as I was reviewing them. 
  • I broke it out and did alphabetically one ‘letter’ at a time, so you felt like you were making progress. It probably took several weeks of cleanup work.
  • Remember: This is only for records that have multiple addresses – many of our records did not, so this may only be a sub-set of your total records.
• During this process, I also deleted out some addresses I did not feel had value to maintain in database (like previous fax numbers, previous website addresses).
  • So this will minimize the amount of phone data retained on records overall – vs. bringing it all over but marking as inactive. 
  • Assess what may no longer be valuable and consider getting rid of it. Is an old phone number for an organization valuable? Is an old email address for someone valuable or not? Do we need fax numbers anymore?  Etc.
    • It’s an opportunity to get rid of some data that is no longer valuable for long-term, so this cleanup effort will be beneficial.
• If during this process, you’re essentially moving all your phone data over onto the Preferred address:
  • Assess any implications that might have on your existing queries/exports/reports.
  • Is this going to be a problem in the short-term if you’re reporting out on this data, showing this data online, etc.?
  • Do you have to make any interim adjustments for the phone/email data to be present ONLY on the preferred address record?
    • Ex: We already had in place the rule that all emails are on the Preferred address, so that was a ‘non-issue’ for us.
    • We’re not that concerned that the phone data is ‘shifting’ positions, as this is not critical for us on reports, online directories.  We’re OK with showing the phones on the preferred address.

 
Clean-up process:

On individual records:

• On other ‘active’ addresses that were not preferred, moved all phones/emails off of these onto the Preferred address

On organization records:

• Reviewed ALL addresses on record and removed any duplicate phones on the ‘inactive’ addresses. 
  • I believe the system would have automatically ‘ignored’ these since they are duplicates, but some were categorized under different phone types so they might have come in?
  • To be safe, I preferred to make sure there were no duplicates.
• Left phone numbers on inactive addresses that I wanted to have converted over as ‘inactive’.
  • I did manually delete out any previous Faxes as I didn’t think there was value in keeping those.