Ides of March TLS deadline

It's good to know we're not alone in postponing.


We've never entered/processed credit cards in RE and don't use any of the ancillary BB products, so I was fairly confident that we wouldn't be affected, but wanted to get upgraded before the 15th anyway because our work load starts picking up in April.  I had a bit of a scare earlier this month when I realized that we DO get credit card numbers put directly into RE Gifts from our ticketing system that we use to sell memberships, but found out that those come across as already obfuscated text, so RE never sees it as a "real" credit card number that it might need to tokenize through BB servers (which is what happens if you try to store a credit card number on a Constituent record).


Just to clarify, the TLS upgrade is required for PCI compliance, but it involves much more than just credit cards, it involves all encrypted data flowing over the internet, which would affect data coming into RE from Online Express, NetCommunity, etc.  Essentially anything where RE communicates with another Blackbaud system even if credit card numbers aren't involved.


I'll go ahead and add that our test conversion has gone VERY smoothly.  We've gone directly from 7.93 to 7.96 Patch 8 and haven't had any of the problems early adopters had with phone number conversion.  There may need to be some minor cleanup, but for the most part everything seems to have converted very well.  We won't be able to take advantage of some of the new features, like having multiple "Home" phone numbers because of our interface with external systems that can't support them, but we're accustomed to that sort of trade-off.