Tips for Keeping Blackbaud CRM Up to Date

Peter Youngman

Updating Blackbaud CRM™ with the latest Service Pack is essential to keeping the solution working effectively and helping your organization meet its goals. The following tips provide a brief overview of the Service Pack process and how you can apply them to your instance of Blackbaud CRM.

• We recommend Blackbaud CRM customers upgrade to each new Service Pack shortly after it is released. Service Packs are the release vehicle used for delivering maintenance corrections and new capabilities to Blackbaud CRM. This may include enhancements to security or performance, so it’s important to stay current.

• Services Packs are scheduled as needed but not more frequently than every three months. We recommend planning for a quarterly upgrade. If that’s not possible, we advise upgrading to the latest Service Pack at least every six months.

• Service Packs are cumulative in nature and contain all fixes released through prior Service Packs or Hot Fixes. Service Packs improve quality and performance and undergo regression/release testing. We document new features in the New Features Guide for Blackbaud CRM & BBIS 4.0.
  
  
• The amount of testing you perform before upgrading your production environment to a new Service Pack is at your discretion and may depend on any customizations or integrations you have in place. That said, many Blackbaud CRM customers upgrade their environments regularly with minimal testing in a condensed timeframe. For example, some customers have completed testing and deployment in less than two weeks. We recommend upgrading your staging/QA environment first to perform testing in a non-production environment.
  
  
• Critical defects that require immediate attention are considered for delivery via a Hot Fix. Hot Fixes are cumulative in nature and contain all fixes in previously released Hot Fixes or Service Packs. For example, if you are currently on Service Pack 27, any Hot Fix released will contain all fixes and features previously released through Service Pack 27 and prior Hot Fixes. Blackbaud will evaluate lower severity items for a future Service Pack. By staying current on the latest Service Pack, Blackbaud is best able to provide support should you encounter defects.
  
  
• Any Hot Fixes released to address critical defects are included in the next Service Pack, unless otherwise stated. To address critical or urgent situations, we may also elect to deploy a Hot Fix to the (n-1) Service Pack. This is not standard practice and completed on an exception basis only. We also maintain a Blackbaud CRM 4.0 Known Issues Report for all customers, which is available via Knowledgebase Article 71662.
  
  
• When planning to upgrade, Blackbaud recommends always upgrading to the most recent Service Pack available. This enables you to access the latest maintenance corrections, security enhancements, and newest capabilities. This also helps us provide the best possible support should you need it. If you encounter an issue on the latest Service Pack, we will deploy a Hot Fix (or other script fix) for critical defects.
  
  
• As we continue transitioning to our public cloud environment, we will improve the Service Pack upgrade experience. To save time, resources, and money for your mission, we also recommend using the Blackbaud UAT Automation Kit (https://docs.blackbaud.com/uat-kit-docs/). This can help automate User Acceptance Testing for Blackbaud CRM and other products.

If you have any questions about the Service Pack process, please contact your Customer Success Manager.