[CChesler]

I'm doing my Integration Planning - and running into time constraints, don't we all? Now I'm trying to balance my desire for a pristine database with the Development and Admissions staff desire for me to get this done so I can move on to other issues.
I would love to hear from those of you have already completed your EE/RE Integration - particularly in terms of what data clean up projects you are glad that you did before you integrated.
And Elaine - your iTunes list of soothing music might be helpful as well!
Thanks -

[Kim Buinicky]

We are also hoping to integrate RE & FE soon. We were told by Blackbaud that they will have to help us and of course will charge us (WAY TOO MUCH) to do it. Has anyone integrated without paying Blackbaud for help? We are becoming more and more frustrated with the high cost of working with Blackbaud and their products. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, or direction to a previous thread on this topic!!

Kim Buinicky
RE Database Admin
Miami Valley Women's Center
Dayton, OH

[Randi]

We just integrated without using blackbaud's help. I think it was a mistake. It's not easy no matter what, but at least they know their product and it's capabilities. When I came on board, the organization had already mapped a bunch of fields into places that weren't the best place for them to be. Now I have to do all sorts of cleanups because they didn't think ahead.

By the way - cleanups I wish had taken place ahead of time: country names and addressing options for international, state names and abbreviations, addressee and salutations, segmenting deceased records and splitting the titles (old system did not have separate record for spouse, so the title said "Mr. and Mrs." )

[Elaine Tucker]

We have 10,297 individuals in the admissions database (notice I said individuals, I haven't EVEN tackled our applicants!!!!) and have been working for 4 days now on cleaning up the add sal table AND the coding of records associated with that..

I haven't been able to export all the fields I need:
Import ID
Last Name
First Name
Middle Name
Title1
Title2
Suffix1
Suffix2
all the same fields for the spouse .... and then....
Primary Addressee ID
Primary Salutation ID
and the associated import ID's for them.

Everytime I think I've got the import right and import the data in I get stumped, bumbled, run over by WRONG data....

So I finally brokedown and called support - the case is under review because I've done the import so many times that I can't even tell them why the data is wrong...

So... long story short - clean up BEFORE converting...

Also, can anyone give me some pointers?

Thanks for listening.

Also, did you know that you CAN"T set the order of all the tables in EE (like add sals for example?) If you need that please go vote on the ideas page -


Thanks again,
Elaine

[kcoop]

All,

I keep reading everyone's posts about integration and all the nightmares everyone is having. Is any one up for a user meeting online? I have a subscription to GOTOMeeting and I can host up to 15 people. I would be glad to host one so that we can share information. I am an EE consultant (this meeting would be no cost and no sales pitch) it just seems that if we all got together and looked at a test system we might be able to go through or at least discuss what it means when you go through integration ( I can only speak for EE/RE sync). I have set up the integration with one client and it does work but we have had to re-do some things based on what we really should have done based on poor BB documentation. As they say "learn from the mistakes of others... there isn't enough time in your life to do it yourself"

E-mail me a kcoop@kdctechno.com if anyone has an interest.


Karla Coop

[Randi]

I'm going through an integration nightmare right now and I don't even know how to explain it. Does anybody else use a third party vendor to integrate web donations/purchases into RE? We're having a tremendous issue with the tributes. I'm on the user end, and not techy enough to understand the programming, I just know it's not working correctly. Any ideas?

[nisaac]

I'm not sure whether you are looking for a third party consultant or asking about the credit card processing vendor (such as IATS) or something else. We use BBNC and RE and integrate the two. Please give more specifics.

[Randi]

Question is - when somebody makes a tribute donation online, do you manually add the tribute after the donation gets downloaded into RE or does it add the tribute to the honoree's tribute record (if it already exists) and create a new one if it does not exist? How do you control where they go?

Our liason to the company that is creating our integration application is now saying that in order to do this correctly, we have to query on the gifts that come in over the web that are tributes and manually add the tribute information.

I saw how your website works and I truly wish ours was smart enough to change the available fields for international countries. Every time we get an international address online it goes in incorrectly and we have to manually fix it.

[Elaine Tucker]

Update on our integration with EE & FE (& associated update from Student Billing 6 to 7)...

We're doing our test conversion today and our BB consultant has hit a small glitch - I'd say the consultant is worth the money as it takes the worries off my plate and they can trouble shoot things directly with their cs/kb solutions team to trouble shoot.