Notice of Planned Deprecation (Retirement) of User Networking Manager in Blackbaud Internet Solutions and Blackbaud NetCommunity in early 2021.

Why is this happening?  

Microsoft Silverlight is a deprecated application framework for writing and running Internet applications (similar to Adobe Flash). Microsoft announced that Silverlight will reach the end of support on October 12, 2021.   

Parts that use Silverlight are being retired from our Products as they cannot be maintained effectively.  The only product feature impacted by this is User Networking.  

Our analysis of User Networking indicates that a low number of our clients have implemented this feature, and most use alternative, more up-to-date Social Media applications to achieve their needs.   

Which Parts are affected?  

Three related Parts were identified which would be impacted post Silverlight's deprecation: 

• User Networking Manager: Allows creation of a socially active online community (similar to Facebook) 

• My Friends: When a user visits a profile display page of a friend, this part allows them to see their full network of friends that they can interact with.  

• User Link: Allows users to perform direct actions from another user’s profile page. Such as “Send message” or “Add friend”. 

What does this mean?  

This means that after release of Service Pack 27 for BBIS and SP4 for BBNC these Parts will not be available.  

• Existing User Networking Parts will no longer work. 

• Existing User Networking Parts cannot be copied. 

• New instances of User Networking Parts cannot be created. 

Action required  

If your organization provides User Networking as part of your online community, we recommend communicating to your external supporters/users that this feature will be unavailable as of the date you plan to upgrade to the Service Pack in which we have implemented this functionality retirement.