We are a group of users of Blackbaud products and are not affiliated with Blackbaud. We'd love to have you join our community to help and be helped in getting the most from your Blackbaud software.
Register now to join us to get independant advice on your system, connect with 3rd party consultants to help you maximize your database and have a real alternative to the official Blackbaud website.
how many of you have a non-networked test server/workstation for testing upgrades, patches, new plugins, customatizations, etc before releasing them to your users and live network?
When possible, please describe what you have in addition to voting.
It's budget planning time again!
thanks!
Matthew
__________________ things haven't been the same since that house fell on my sister.
I have worked at many different organisations that use Raiser's Edge. The majority of organisations that have more than 5 users tend to have either a test server or a test server with work station. They tend to be networked but one or two of them use completely stand alone machines.
This is even more important when you have customisations. Two of the organisations have multiple test servers that are networked.
One of these has a development server, training server and production server with many people having access to them
Another has a two development servers, two UAT (user acceptance testing) servers and a productions server. This organisation also has a TIE test server.
These last two are really quite large with over 50 user licenses.
Can we have another option in the list that says, "we may or may not have a test server, but if we do, you can be damn sure that our IT department won't let us mere administrators within 50 yards of it"?
__________________ Simon Koppel
Senior Database Executive
Cancer Research UK
London, England www.cancer.org.uk
We took a decomissioned desktop PC running XP Pro, put it in the server room, and it runs RE. One thing I learned from setting it up is - make sure you read Blackbaud's KB article on how to create a test server. I did the process out of order, and had a not-so-fun weekend restoring things. I access the server either via Remote Desktop Connection or VNC. The other option was to keep it on my desk, and use a KVM switch, but with RDC, you can allow others to access it.
I'm not sure if there's a way, but it would be great to have Raiser's edge workstation client set up so that I could connect to either the test or the product server as needed. Could I use two user accounts on one workstation?
We run a virtual copy of the database using VM Ware Virtual Center. This came in handy when we were sending out our RE data for massive re-coding to a third party -- we were able to test the import on a current copy of the database in the virtual environment before going live.
__________________ S. Drouin
amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
We have a test server primarily for training and test areas of RE that we aren't using yet - I'd love to have a development server so I can test the patches or latest version of RE.
Rick
__________________ Rick Baker Insititutional Advancement Systems Specialist Gallaudet University
SKD - That's an interesting idea - I'll have to look into it at some point
If you are not able to afford the VM Ware server then you could take a look at Microsoft's version that is free! I used it for a bit but it was painfully slow on a regular workstation.
test server/workstation? 
Linear Mode
