Upcoming Contact Information Changes in The Education Edge 7.87 Patch 3

As a reminder to our Education Edge customers who integrate with The Raiser's Edge, this week we're releasing a very important patch to The Education Edge. We recommend before you install the patch, run the integration sync before you update your software. Then, we recommend you install The Education Edge 7.87 patch 3 before you update to The Raiser's Edge 7.94 next week.

Since the patch releases this week, before the end of this blog post, pause and go run the integration sync between The Education Edge and The Raiser's Edge before you finish reading. It's an essential step in preparing you for the upcoming changes to the integration.

When is the patch available?

The Education Edge will release a patch to hosted customers on 2/5/2015 to prepare you for The Raiser’s Edge 7.94 release on 2/8/2015. If you do not host these applications with Blackbaud Hosting, the updates will be available from the Blackbaud.com downloads webpage on 2/9/2015. It is important that you apply The Education Edge patch before you update The Raiser’s Edge.

Summary of Changes

Upcoming improvements to The Raiser’s Edge 7.94 mean that phone numbers and email addresses no longer are attached to specific addresses but instead live off The Raiser’s Edge constituent record. In The Raiser’s Edge, they made an improvement on the database level that separated physical addresses from contact information. All live directly off the constituent record now.

The changes to The Raiser’s Edge also include removing the concept of phone sharing since this is also not a reflection of current constituent record needs. Therefore, for customers who integrate The Raiser’s Edge with The Education Edge, we will also remove phone sharing for Education Edge records. However, the ability to copy address information has not been removed. When addresses are copied between records in The Education Edge, the phone numbers will copy as well.

If you are using ConnectRE to integrate your Whipple Hill Solution or are leveraging the Online Admissions and Reenrollment forms, these changes will not impact your experience.

And, if you do not integrate with The Raiser's Edge, these changes will not impact you.

What should I do after the software updates?

The most important recommendation we have after you update The Education Edge and then The Raiser’s Edge, is to ensure you do not have duplicate phone numbers or email/web addresses. Data cleanup is always important so you are copying the most accurate information. For the best data health between The Education Edge and The Raiser’s Edge, we recommend that you allow only one number or address for each contact type for your constituents. If you have constituents with multiple numbers or addresses for a single contact type, the integration sync will still complete and everything but that contact information will copy. If a single contact type has multiple numbers or addresses associated with it, an error will appear in the integration activity report.

For example, if a constituent in The Raiser's Edge has multiple phone numbers listed as the "home phone number," the sync still completes fine but the home phone number will throw an exception to the report.
We also recommend that you allow constituents to have only one contact type to each phone number or address. Do not assign a phone number or email/web address to more than one type. For example, do not assign a constituent’s mobile phone to the home and mobile phone type.

Important Reading

Before you update The Education Edge with the latest patch, we recommend you review the update guide for 7.87 patch 3. The update guide contains detailed information on how to prepare for the upcoming contact information changes between The Education Edge and The Raiser's Edge.