Question to those in the BB RE Hosted Environment

Isaac Comer

We're local rather than being hosted.


To anyone that is hosted: what version of Windows and of Office is the hosted environment currently running?


I ask because since we locally upgraded to Windows 10 and Office 365, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of intermittent errors trying to get Raiser's Edge to export files.

Cathleen Mai

Following this as we are planning to upgrade to Windows 10 and Office 365 as well.

Aaron Rothberg

Hi Isaac-


I wasn't able to find any documentation online about the operating systems they run in a hosted environment. If I were Blackbaud, I might not divulge that information, not for secrecy, but simply to give myself the flexibility to move hosted databases from one environment to another as my management needs dictate (failed servers, load balancing, etc) as all of their servers may not be the exact same environment or the exact same patch level.


As for the version of Office in Boston's hosted environment, it's Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12). Welcome to the future!





 

Isaac Comer

Thanks.


In the hosted environment, I don't know if they let you see the Windows desktop, or if it drops you directly into RE.  If you are able to get to task manager, you might be able to start a new task:  "winver" (no quotes).  That tells you the windows version on almost any of them going back to 1.0.


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In any case, I suspect they're on Win XP or Win 7.


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The reason I'm trying to work this out, is our gift processors are having an inordinate number of issues since we upgraded to Win 10/Office 365 (Office 2016, 32-bit to be precise).  


And then there's Address Accelerator -- it fails lots.


As a last ditch effort, I'm mentally debating about asking IT to set up some emulated Win 7 systems with, I guess Office 2007.

Aaron Rothberg

Citrix drops you right into Raiser's Edge. If you see the desktop, it's because of an error and you can't interact with the desktop. I have no idea what issues you're experiencing, but if producing exports is the problem, being hosted should fix it. If reading the reports is a problem, I wonder if the problem might still occur when the gift processors open an Office 12 produced document in an Office 2016 environment. 

Graham Getty

Isaac Comer‍ when you move to hosted, be sure to ask to move to "Cloud Hosting" (which is powered by Azure instead of Boston / Orange County / Vancouver traditional hosting sites) if you are in cloud hosting, you will be using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016. If you are in other versions of hosting, I think it is still a much older version of Office.



 

Tom Klimchak

Isaac Comer‍ We moved to BB hosting in December of 2018.  We were scared to death, but other than a few months of Queue not working (oy) it's actually been really, really smooth.  We were set up in the Cloud Hosting/Azure server environment that Graham Getty‍ mentioned.  


All of our exports and mail merges have worked remarkably well, AddressAccelerator is lightning fast (compared to our previous local setup) and I can't think of single moment of real downtime.  We had a few issues getting the proper version of Citrix working, but those were mostly local rights and security issues on our PCs, not anything Blackbaud could control.

robert badley

I would be really interested in hearing what Canadian clients using RE:NXT feel about Graham Getty's comment above.

• Have you found any difficulty using a Vancouver hosted version of NXT with respect to versions of Office that are available?
• Are any Canadian clients cloud hosted on Azure and if so are there any concerns about data base location bearing in mind CRA guidance about location of financial data?