[barbara.martin]

Hi everyone,
We have many users outside of Advancement that have requested access to alumnae/i information, and thus Raiser's Edge (deans and their support staff, graduate school career offices, etc.). Back when we were on Benefactor, they were given access to this information. It was taken away when we went live with RE back in 2006.

There are huge costs associated with extending access to external stakeholders, both in terms of licensing and support (not to mention political and turf issues) - especially as Blackbaud does not seem to offer a site licensing scheme.

Anyway, my question is really about RE:Anywhere. I would like to provide very limited access to basic biographical information (name, address, employment, class and school, perhaps prospect classification and giving summary) to select external stakeholders. I would also like to allow major gifts staff the ability to enter contact reports from the road. I assume I can do these things with RE:Anywhere? I also assume our internal support costs would be minimized as there wouldn't be any application to install.

Does anyone have experience using this product? Comments? Advice? We don't have citrix, nor do we have a real vpn option.

Thanks for any thoughts.
Barbara
Simmons College

[sthilali]

Barbara,
It sounds like it would solve your problem. We have RE anywhere - however it is rarely used by our prospect managers. But if your's are accustomed to having it then I imagine it would be worth the investment.
The only issue our IT dept has w/it is the security - since its webbased if someone got ahold of a username/password or was able to hack into it clearly theres a lot of confidential information. Obviously for those you are looking to set up you could limit thier security settings - but I beileve any RE user would automatically be able to access RE anywhere.
The only other issue we've had with it, is it is slow - but this was more for our heavy RE users who thought they'd be able to do query's etc - you can but its slow.

Hope that helps.

Lisa
Southern NH University

[wolfganghario]

Hi Barbara,

I'm fairly sure this has come up in the not too distant past, but here are my thoughts anyway - before installing RE on our Terminal server we used RE Anywhere and it worked fine for what it sounds like you want to use it for. It is very basic, and it looks a bit different, but essentially it does what you'd expect it to. We did have some issues with mail and there is no export option (though you can still query and export through that).
We stopped using it when we installed it on the terminal server though because we can now do everything we could in the office (ie mailing, export...etc) and RE Anywhere seemed quite slow (that could have been unique to us though).
The other downside was that whereas you get various fixes and patches for RE, there's not so much of that with RE Anywhere so if you come across a hitch then I don't think it's going to fixed very quickly (again, just an impression I got).

Lee
Courtauld Institute of Art

[barbara.martin]

Thanks for the responses. I really want to get away from installing the application on remote machines (one of our grad schools is a mile away) and it seems like RE:Anywhere is ok for very basic lookups so this may be a suitable solution for us. - b.

[Robin]

We found RE:Anywhere to be too different from RE in terms of navigation. It almost looks like a totally different product. It was not user friendly for the people we had on the road who were not computer savvy. Also it was incredibly slow and there were lots of problems with connectivity. We are going to a terminal server.