Sorry to get your hopes up but I am reliably informed that you cannot do this. And the reason? “PCI Compliance”. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the Raiser’s Edge users that I speak to complain that Blackbaud only offers CSV and tab delimited files as a way of importing data. They say that this is very limiting, that CSV can be unwieldy to work with outside of The Raiser’s Edge. They are also very pleased to hear that any customisation that I write allows them to import from Excel and also writes reports to Excel too. Excel offers so much functionality to prepare your data. However there are problems working with the Excel object model from within the API Read the rest of this entry »

After dispelling the myth that you do not need to buy the Blackbaud API module for The Raiser’s Edge in order to work with customisations (you can run a plug-in), I usually get asked well what are the disadvantages of using a plug-in? I normally say that one of problems with a plug-in is that somebody has to press the “start” button. I recently found a solution to this. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote some code for a client a while back and tested it thoroughly and everything worked fine. There was somewhat of a delay before the client was due to implement it and when they ran the application it crashed at the beginning. After some investigation we worked out what was going on. The code gathered together a collection of constituents that had two constituent codes. Only now one of them was no longer in The Raiser’s Edge. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of the work that I do involves the integration of third party products with The Raiser’s Edge. It is not always right to develop a custom application to perform this integration. There are many factors including the volume of data transfer, the complexity of data, how quickly the data needs to be integrated and of course what budget is available. This article attempts to outline the options available to Raiser’s Edge managers who need to integrate with non-Blackbaud products.

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There was a question recently on Blackbus asking how to open a link from a constituent record. For example if you had an external system that uses constituent ids to find individuals it would be very useful to be able to open a web page from the constituent window by pressing the macro button and going to the web page that is specific for the constituent. This requires the VBA module. Here is how it is done:

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The title is somewhat dramatic and probably not relevant to many people however for me and a client that I work with it proved to be a disaster. This is not the first time that Blackbaud has changed the API and it certainly won’t be the last but this was annoying. So what am I referring to?

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When I first started out working with Raisers Edge API I realised that I was reusing many routines over and over and that would it not be better to create my own tools class so that I would not reinvent the wheel. Over the years I have added items to this class that I have found useful and have developed older items in order to do more things. In this post I will share with you some of the items that I find invaluable. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been at the Blackbaud European Conference for the past two days and had a great time. My session seemed to go well enough and I hope that those that were there found it useful. Again if you want see the slides again then look at the posting below. (Note that you can watch it full screen using the second from right icon at the bottom of the presentation).

If you don’t remember anything else about my presentation remember this: You do not need to purchase RE:API to create a plugin. You are not going to hear that from Blackbaud too often but I have been told from high up in the company that this is the case. You are able to develop your plugin against the sample database (where all the modules are unlocked) and then deploy it to your production database.

I had a good conference and learnt a great deal about BBEC (Blackbaud Enterprise CRM) and the new Infinity platform. (Thank you Ben). Watch this space for more about my experiences of that product.

I am really looking forward to the Blackbaud European Conference. Apart from the fact that I will be speaking there it will be great to meet a lot of the people whose posts I have read on the Blackbaud forums and on Blackbus.

If you are going to be there then come along to my session: The Raiser’s Edge Decoded – A first look at the Raiser’s Edge API. This will be a non-technical look at what can be done with the API. I will be looking at real live examples of how the API can be used to improve your organisations efficiency. The session is at 13.30 on Monday 20th October. I shall be at the conference both days and available to answer any questions you may have