[CChesler]

I think those of us dealing with synchronization need to speak up and connect. I posted the following on the Blackbaud Integration forum:

I thought I would create a new thread - because the synchronization problems are a different - and in my opinion - much larger - issue than Integration. On March 28th I ran a synchronization that caused a number of problems - including the address record information being unlinked on a number of students and mothers. It happened randomly - in some cases unlinking all the address fields for all the children within a family - in other's unlinking just the phone number of one child. The extremely frustrating part was - there is not a query you can run to find the records that are unlinked. The History tab of the records that were changed does not record the unlinking of the address fields. I reported this to Blackbaud, sent them two copies of my database (pre and post synchronization) - and then had to keep sending them names of students and mothers that had been unlinked as I found them - for troubleshooting purposes. Apparently the developers are also unable to create a query to identify records that have a relationship but the address records are not linked. In the meantime, we continue to check records and re-link the students - one at a time.
Looks like Sonja had exactly the same problem in May that I reported in March. I have not run a synchronization since March - which concerns me. I've run Integration to add in the new families coming to our school for next year. However, I'm not willing to synchronize.
I'm curious to hear from anyone else who has reported this issue of records being unlinked. Any success in getting a fix?

Anyone else having these same issues?
Starting when?

Candace Chesler

[Elaine Tucker]

We haven't tied all the db together, but this is GOOD ot know.... I'm with you --Syncs UNTIE......(er unite)

[bparsons]

Hi all,
We're in the process of doing our pre-Integration cleanup, and I'm starting to get a little nervous about both integration and subsequent synchronization...
Does anyone have any lessons learned to share that might help us navigate this process...?
Many thanks in advance for your help,
Beth

[Elaine Tucker]

I started working on de-duping individual relationships and haven't finished yet... (that was back in 06.... uyep 2006!!) so I have tabled our integration "go live date" to some where far in the future. Although we did make huge progress in a major project.

We have made the RE cons ID and the EE record ID the same for all our current parents and current students. This should help tremendously when we do decide to move forward. I THINK we could (in theory) integrate/syncronize incrementally - meaning only those who have the same ID in both, but I'm not sure, and don't want to risk all the great hewdway we've made.

[webmistress]

Hi all. We currently have our EE and RE databases linked and synching. We are synching students, parents and faculty/staff. Of the fields avaialble we are synching all except "class of", "date left" and "relationship notes". We've had some rough patches getting here but at the moment everything is working well for us. One "breakthrough" was the patch released the first week of July which seemed to fix many of the issues that we prevsiouly experienced. Since then, we're on track.

For anyone who hasn't yet gone through integration, my suggestion is to have your data as clean as possible -- reviewing all EE and RE records that will be linked. It took us roughly a monthly to link our 3500 records - and that was after all of our pre-integration clean-up.

I'll watch this thread but if anyone wants to talk more about this just let me know.

~Rachel