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.
Hope someone out there in BB-land can help with this ...
I've been asked to do some testing for our upgrade from 7.6 to 7.84 to make sure all systems are go. Does anyone have any testing strategy/protocol/process they'd be willing to share?
Right now I'm just running some critical queries, exports and reports and exporting them out -- will rerun them in the new version to see if I get the same results. Is there much more to this process than that (she asks naively...?)
__________________ Gina Gerhard
Business Systems Analyst
New Hampshire Charitable Foundation
there have been some significant enhancements since 7.6..two off the top of my head are the events module (with grouped events) and the ability to use e-receipts through mail w/o NetSolutions or NetCommunity...but there are others. In addition to the technical back-end of things, you might want to get a head start thinking about the new functionality you're going to have and speak with your users to determine what you want to implement and what you're not going to implement even tho it will look different. (for example, the user experience in the events module is slightly different and skittish users might balk at the new options).
__________________ things haven't been the same since that house fell on my sister.
We kind of have 2 testing phases that we go through here. 1 - IT tests the new features (I literally work my way through all of the new features that are listed in the guides with each version) as well as try out all the normal everyday processes that I know other offices do so that I can answer questions. I also test out how my Access databases run (or whether or not they run) since I have reports & other processes that can't be run from within RE. 2 - Then we ask the users to come down & run through the processes that they do on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis so that we know that everything works ok & that if a process doesn't work, we know about it ahead of time.
I know that this isn't an exact list but I hope it helps.
__________________ Pat Melcher Columbus College of Art & Design Columbus, OH
All users have access to our test server environment, so about 2 to 3 weeks before I upgrade production, I send an email to my database managers at the campuses to have their people test their processes in the test area. If that clears, then I spend at least a day during that time testing various imports and external processes that I have (SSIS things, crystal reports things, script things, etc).
BTW, for your notes, there have been times when stuff tested out fine in the test server, then for some reason, when we moved to production, its all gone to hell... I will say that BB has gotten much better recently in testing their releases, so this doesn't happen anywhere near as frequently as it used to.
Doug
__________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Doug Creek
RE Database Administrator
University of Alaska Foundation sndgc@email.alaska.edu
I would recommend checking your system statistics also to make sure that the numbers are the same. This would be your first hint that something was fishy!
You may ask your users for mission-critical queries, exports, and reports.
Also check any custom-built Crystal Reports, in case the field names have changed, which happens from time to time.
Linear Mode
