What's New in Blackbaud K-12: April 3, 2019 Release

April may have only just arrived, but we’re not wasting any time in updating Blackbaud’s Cloud Solution for K-12 Schools!


Release 14.04, which officially launches tomorrow on April 3, is quite the loaded update. Nearly each product is represented this month, though Academics and Core have the most to check out. Data Import is a big topic for Core in April while Academics has a lot of quality of life improvements.


So, let’s have a quick look at a few of the items included in the April 3 release:

Core: Introducing the Contract card manager role! If you’re a platform manager, you can enable the new Contact card manager role. With this role, you can manage personal data that’s common to any user like emergency contacts, education information, demographics, and more. This new role can use the People finder and the Core user profile’s Contact card, but not more powerful platform manager tasks. You can also use the Handle profile changes task, which makes it easier to make corrections on a user’s Contact card.


So, what’s the point? Well, this role makes work easier for users who are responsible for keeping user data up to date. In addition, this role is useful for schools to grant API access to our third party partners who rely on accessing or updating contact card data.


For more details, check out our blog on it and managing profile data here.

School website: More Photo Management options! New this month are quality of life updates for managing photos used with in School website. Check it out!

• Once you upload a video to Content, Media, and then Photos, you can preview what the image will look like to the end user. Select the tiny thumbnail that appears after the image is uploaded to see the photo in a new modal that displays the actual size and orientation. This works for all newly added images as well as ones that have previously been uploaded.
• If you have multiple images uploaded to a category, you can now scroll through all of them using the Next photo or Previous photo selectors.

Core: Important End of Life/Change Details for Some SSO integrations. On August 31, 2019, we’re replacing a couple of integrations with Blackbaud ID for SSO:

• Google Apps SSO
• LDAP Integration

Schools that use these integrations can begin to switch to Blackbaud ID, which provides industry-standard, modern authentication. Better yet, Blackbaud ID for SSO is already being used in other Blackbaud products such as Raiser’s Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT, Smart Tuition, and Blackbaud.com. Need to learn how to switch to Blackbaud ID? Check out this post for more.


As you’ve seen in previous ‘What’s New’ blogs, there’s a lot more to discover with this update than just what I’ve posted here. Head on over to our online help center to view the complete release notes for April 3. Also, on release day, the embedded help panel will also be updated to display the latest release notes.


If you’d like a visual overview of what’s included in this update, we also have our monthly release video to show off everything in this release. While you’re there, we’d love it if you gave us a like on the video and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel for all our latest video content.

 



As always, thanks for stopping by and checking out our content here in the K-12 Community! Leave a comment below if you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hey! In addition, feel free to click the Like button below the post if you enjoyed this post or if you thought the information was helpful.


May is going to be a special month for us here in K-12 as we’re not just giving you one update, but you’ll be seeing two from us. Until then, make sure to come back next week as we have more great content lined up for you. Thanks for reading everyone!