Moving to Azure - after a 2 year wait :)

Hi,


We migrated on August 13 and there were several issues we have that were never mentioned to us. First off, we schedule our time for after 12:30 pm on a Friday. Giving everyone ample time to get their work done and have 1/2 day off. Well we were all working batching, updates, etc and at 11:00 lost all connection. I never received any notice that our migration would be starting at said time. or earlier for that matter. I could not get in touch with our rep to find out what was going on. The damage was already done. All of our work done that morning was lost. Then on Monday I come in not knowing what was supposed to be done. I called support and was lucky to speak with Darleen who spent over an hour helping me set up my users, roles, etc. She even sent me links to help. I did all the training prior to the migration and still had questions. My rep didn't reach out to me until Tuesday. By then I was all set up and dealing with all the issues below. If you have or use other modules or software integrated with RE, you will have issues that need to be resolved. Here are issues I found:


1. AddressAccelerator no longer worked - BB gave us a new link to redirect

2. Matchfinder - I had to upload our companies to BB FTP site for updating and reload them back in to RE

3. Unable to merge records. BB reconnected LO

4. Gifts not coming down in RELO - Blackbaud reconnected LO

5. Research Point link disappeared

6. Emails that were created in luminate with links to event registration prior to our migration, were no longer valid. (this major issue is still being investigated)


Had we been told what modules and software would be affect, I would not have had to spend a week resolving all this issues. I hope you have a better experience than we did! Good luck.


Patti Posey

Stamford Hospital Foundation

Hi Larry, I thought the same thing! But that's not true. Once the migration is complete, you as the administrator, go to Control Panel in the webview and click on security. You should see a list of your fundraisers. You will also see who is active and who hasn't activated their blackbaud account. Click and roles and begin to create roles for each tile. You can have different roles for each tile depending on how much access you want them to have, i.e. MGO, Gift Processor, Supervisor, etc. Once you create your roles, then you go back to the users and click on each your and assign them roles. Once the roles are assigned, they will have permissions for only what you assigned them. Note: the security groups you have them set up in database view will still apply to the database view and some of those securities carry over to the webview. There are lots to understand about roles and all that goes with each “tile”. I'm still modifiyng as we go along because I'm still learning the different access. Hope this helps.

Patti Posey

I'm not sure our experience would be equitable, since we moved from self-hosted to Azure. Our report/export processing time is much slower since moving to cloud-hosted, and it did take a full weekend to transition. We “closed up” Friday morning, and by Monday, the system was ready for us to begin setting up our user accounts. We did have a few frustrating hiccups, which Support resolved for us, but I don't recall it having to do with plugins. All in all, the transition was painful, but once it was set up, we have been very happy with its performance.

@Joanne Felci, it's been 5 months so things might have changed but we did not have to do anything with files loaded via NXT or media files. The only file issue was for files downloaded to the Citrix file storage (like the big exports that run from queue overnight). It's the files accessed from the Citrix window. As you're not hosted by Citrix in the same way, you can't access any files saved there. It was a good file clean up as some files there were old and no longer needed anyway.