I have been developing some updates for The Mergician. There are some nice additions coming soon including clean up of duplicate attributes and appeals following the merge. However one item that has been added is the request to select a record as the primary constituent if it has a NetCommunity Login associated with it. Continue reading Checking Constituents for a NetCommunity Login
All posts by David Zeidman
Valid date to cannot be less than Valid date from when saving a Raiser’s Edge Membership record
Valid date to cannot be less than Valid date from
I got this error message the other day when developing with the membership module. In my opinion the membership module is the most complicated module to develop code for. Possibly because of this (and the fact that it is an optional module) there appears to be the least documentation about it. When I searched the knowledgebase for this error I did get a hit. It referred to NetSolutions. It suggested that the membership record did not have an expiry date.
This was not the case in my data. I had an activity date and an expiry date as required.
I worked out what the problem was. The issues happened when adding a membership card. I share this code between new memberships and a case where you may want to add a new membership card to an existing transaction. For a new membership card I was setting the card date as the same as the transaction date. The expiry date, by default was being set to the same as the membership’s expiry date. This worked fine for new memberships.
When I went to add a membership card to, say, a lapsed membership, (why this would happen in reality is uncertain but it was happening in my case), the start date was set to the transaction date i.e. today but the expiry date was in the past so the card’s expiry date was also in the past.
I checked for this scenario and set the membership card’s start date to one day before the expiry date if the expiry date was not after the start date.
Some New (to me) Raiser’s Edge registry settings
When I wrote an article a while back about the setting up a non-production database, I thought that I had the registry and how Blackbaud use it well understood. Of course that was before Vista, Windows 7 and elevated admin rights.
Continue reading Some New (to me) Raiser’s Edge registry settings
A New Raiser’s Edge Package released but no sign of RE on the Infinity platform
Fundraising UK are reporting that Blackbaud have released a new version of The Raiser’s Edge. This is clearly not the new version that very many people have been waiting for. It is not RE8 nor is it on the Infinity platform. It does appear to be useful however for those organisations that want an enhanced, internet aware version of The Raiser’s Edge. The Raiser’s Edge (i) as it has being called (more details on Blackbaud’s site) is a new hosted package that incorporates a web presence as well as donor maintenance application.
As this new product has just been released, it is hard to imagine that Blackbaud will be announcing RE8 on the Infinity platform any time soon. Combine this with the fact that no major enhancements to The Raiser’s Edge version 7 application are expected, many organisations are surely feeling frustrated by Blackbaud’s apparent inertia. I have worked with Enterprise CRM and know how far advanced that application is from the existing version of The Raiser’s Edge. I have said on numerous times that it is worth wait and I still think it is. The question is how long will others hold out. An organisation that is thinking of upgrading functionality will not wait forever for Raiser’s Edge on Infinity and will certainly be tempted to look elsewhere.
Zeidman Development and Audit Trail Free in the news
UK Fundraising are reporting the release of Zeidman Development’s latest release – Audit Trail Free. Nice to see the company in the NP Tech media (even if it was a press release – but still!)
Subtle changes in Visual Studio 2010 make Raiser’s Edge API less typing
I have been using Visual Studio 2010 for a short while now ever since the prospect of developing workflows for Enterprise CRM became a reality. One thing that I noticed when working with The Raiser’s Edge API however is that it is much faster to type out everything.
Continue reading Subtle changes in Visual Studio 2010 make Raiser’s Edge API less typing
Audit Trail for The Raiser’s Edge – A new customisation (free too)
Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release (well re-release) of our Audit Trail customisation. The Audit Trail tracks changes made to records on The Raiser’s Edge. The three versions come in varying degrees of complexity.
Audit Trail Free – tracks constituent deletions and reports them to a log file
Audit Trail Basic – tracks constituent deletions, additions and updates and records them in a table that can be reported on, filter by, sliced and diced etc
Audit Trail Professional – does all of the above but also tracks gifts, relationships, actions and participants.
All three versions tell you who made the change and when. They also tell you the previous values and the updated values.
Audit Trail no longer requires the VBA module – so the free version is truly free!
Check out an overview video. Warning – it’s cute.
For more information including a breakdown in the differences between the versions and to download Audit Trail check out the product page on our website
Infinity platform Workflow on Blackbaud Enterprise CRM
I have just finished Paul Gibson’s Workflow workthrough. At the two Blackbaud conferences I attended recently there was much fan fair about Workflow and how it will blow our minds away. Having just started to look at it in some depth, why were they understating this technology implementation! This did more than blow my mind away. The potential is very clear. All of a sudden very complicated applications can be created without the need to write a single line of code. Move over SSIS and bring on Workflow.
What this space for some more customizations in the future using Workflow.
A Raiser’s Edge C# Plugin
A few days ago I put a question on both Blackbus and the official Blackbaud forums asking if anybody had written a plug-in in C#. I have written a number of customisations in C# (VB.NET is my most common programming language – although I do enjoy using C#) but I had never written a plug-in before. It has always been a web service of application of some kind. I managed to work out how to do it and thought that I would share my solution here. Continue reading A Raiser’s Edge C# Plugin
Blackbaud – My purpose is their passion
I am sitting in the plane on my way back to the UK following the Blackbaud conference in Washington DC. There were no new announcements about the generation eight products (few seem to refer to it as The Raiser’s Edge 8), no new major applications and no new major personnel changes (that I was made aware of). However there was a new branding. The new logo should represent a more open Blackbaud. At first I was unsure about the design. It seemed somewhat cartoon like but now it has grown on me. To put the record straight the tag-line is not as in this post’s title but rather “Your purpose -> Our passion”. I ought to remember it. The free WIFI from Blackbaud at the conference used this as the username and password. Instead I managed to use each permutation available. If we take this tag-line at face value what can we expect?