Moving from 7.93 to 7.94 preparation

If you're not already on 7.94 you won't ever go to 7.94, you'll go directly to 7.95 and they're revamping the phone conversion process that caused so many problems so there's probably not much you can really prepare for at the moment.

John - If an organization needs to move to Hosting now, in order to move to NXT, I think they have to be on 7.94.  My understanding is that all Hosted customers are on 7.94 at this time.



Ronald - Did you talk to your Account Manager about the timing of 7.95?  I strongly recommend that you wait to make the move to Hosting until after 7.95 is available.  I've seen what they're working toward, and it looks good to me...and from what I understand things are going very smoothly.  However, I would also find out if it's possible for them to Host you on 7.93 until 7.95 is released.



We moved from 7.93 to 7.94 back in Feb, and then added NXT in early March.  But we didn't do anything to prepare, really.  If I'd have had any time available, I probably would have, but then again, if I had the time, our database would be a sight cleaner than it is. 



I would avoid 7.94 if at all possible!



 

Ronald,



Your BB Account manager should walk you through this. Since 7.94 is not available to download they would have to get it to you - it was such a clusterf#ck (BB's words, not mine) they don't want anyone on it. We went to it and now have issues which is why they want everyone to wait until 7.95.



I would work directly with Blackbaud to ensure you are ready for and transition smoothly into whatever update you do since they have acknowledged their issues both in the release and its rollout.

I also wanted to get patch 7.94 because of the Phonenumber update. The fact that it's not linked to addresses anymore saves us a lot of time with importing/exporting/checking data.



Last month I asked Blackbaud specifically for the 7.94 patch and they asked me if I made sure I knew what the changes were in the patch and if I was prepared good enough (because of all the problems some organisations had with this patch). I was already fully prepared many months ago and I knew the "risks". After that they gave me the patch.



Concering the patch: there is indeed a big Phonenumber change. But you can just prepare your database for this change (our database has 80,000 records). You just have to make sure that phonenumbers are only located at the Preferred address. You have to delete all the phonenumbers in the Alternate addresses and in the Relationship addresses (Individual/business). You can use Query/Export/Import and the Plug-in Delete Phones for this job. If you want to keep/check the Phonenumbers in the alternate and the relationship records you can backup all those numbers beforehand. I would advice you to just delete all those phonenumbers (our data entry people were already not allowed to store important phonenumber data in alternate/relationship addresses). Or if you want to keep a particular phonenumber from alternate/relationship to preferred you can rename that phonenumber to a new type and import this one in the preferred phonenumbers.

This preparation gives you a "clean" database and makes sure you don't have any duplicate phonenumbers after the patch (you don't want any duplicate phonenumbers...).



We have been using 7.94 now for 3-4 weeks and we have not had any problems/errors so far. 



If you are going to wait until 7.95, it doesn't really matters; you still have to do the same preparation (or at least that's what I am assuming when reading about 7.95). So you can just go to 7.94 if you really want to. It saved us a lot of time with importing/exporting/checking data (addresses/phonenumbers).