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RE, FE and PE integration - does it really work, and how long did THAT take?
My company uses RE and FE, and have linked the two. I don't use either program, but I did overhear a couple of month's worth of struggle to get the two programs working consistently together. Now they're looking into buying PE and integrating all three...they want to have "one database." While I've told them that there isn't really "one database" in this situation, and the research I've done seems to say that integration is GREAT (on sites maintained or trolled by Blackbaud), it also says that integration is a years-long nightmare that most folks end up unhappy with, or stuck with when a colleague leaves (on non-Blackbaud monitored sites). So what's the deal? I'm getting lots of conflicting information, and thought this might be the best place to go for some straight shooting.
Another caveat: our office has a contracted IT specialist who comes in on an as-needed basis to solve problems. The upshot of that is that I end up doing a lot of my own troubleshooting and fixes on a daily basis...and I'm NOT an IT specialist, I just have patience and an strong will to learn new things. Is integration something that would be particularly difficult in an office populated by non-tech-savvy people?
I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on this subject as well. We have RE and PE, which were integrated beginning in June. We will be installing and integrating FE with the other 2 products next month. What can we expect?
Also, Blackbaud recommends to the Patron Edge users to put the middle initial in the first name field so it can be seen in the PE list of patrons. Therefore, if you use the first name in salutations you will need to make the field editable and manually remove the middle initial.
Primary Addressee and Salutation does not come over to RE so you will have to do that manually or globally.
Yes, you will be doing a lot of merging and merging is different than in RE without integration. You don't get to pick which tabs (Gifts, Appeals, Notes, etc.) are merged. You merge everything and then the "Merged from" constituent is deleted forever.
All fields are not available to query on and the ones that are available require text for the criteria even though the criteria is in a table.
The integration does basically create one database which is wonderful even with the above flaws.
__________________ Michael J. Sherman
Database Administrator Sarasota Orchestra (name change 9/3/08)
The new Florida West Coast Symphony
I do like the integration/synch b/w the systems RE and PE but there are issues in cleaning up the database. I would hope we never put the middle initial in the first name field as it sounds like it could mess up my member cards and my letter/acknowledgement fields.
The merging has become a part of my daily existence and when we turned PEO on dupes were created even by outside users. The synch b/w email fields has yet to have been resolved - it is an open case even after a year, I believe...I've made peace with these issues.
As more of a member of the Development/Marketing team, I'm partial to a clean RE database vs someone that sells ticket to patrons directly and daily - I think PE works really great on this side.
Because of the merge issues, I've not synched many of the fields - like Gift and Fund. Backtracking and cleaning this up on every record that I'd had to merge would be really tough. In RE you can't 'merge' a membership. I've had to delete a membership line purchased at the front desk via PE and re-instate it in RE. It is a work around and again, it has become a part of my daily work.
I think when you throw membership into the integration/synch mix stuff can become a little messy. Excuse my lack of DB/IT knowledge and lingo!
I'll be attending the conference again this year and it'll be interesting to see if there are more culture orgs like mine that have integrated RE/PE/PEO.
We haven't had any issues integrating the phone and email fields, but I keep hearing from others that it has been an issue. We've been really happy with the PE/RE integration so far. The challenge has been with PEO, like you said, because online users create brand new records for themselves all the time. Identifying and merging duplicates will probably be my job security here!
We have set up in RE a phone type: Email. In PE there are three fields for Email - only one synchs with RE. And this one field isn't the one that generates a password. Kind of frustrating.
Do you operate a membership program at your institution PCooper?
Come to think of it, I don't think all of our emails from PEO sync with PE or RE. I think it just depends on whether it was the first email submitted by an online user. If they come back and re-register, I believe it's the second email that doesn't get pulled through. We haven't had too many issues about lost passwords come up though.
We do operate a membership program, in fact I manage the membership department. We do things a little differently here. I'm also the database administrator, and I work in Operations rather than Development (strange, I know!).
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