One of the benefits of having Blackbaud host your applications is that we take care of the administrative tasks of creating and saving backups so your IT team doesn’t have to. You also don’t have to worry about disaster recovery.  If anything ever happens to your place of business, we can supply a backup of your data, down to a 15 minute window, should you ... more

Have you set up your hosted Edge products so that you are not required to enter a second username and password when logging in? If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your hosted users, we highly recommend this to reduce the number of logins. This form of authentication is recommended for Mac users as well. When Windows Authentication ... more

Blackbaud’s US offices will be closed on Monday, February 15th in observance of Presidents' Day. Our offices will reopen for normal business hours on Tuesday, February 16th. As always, our online Support resources  will remain available to users with active maintenance. Are you new to the hosting environment or a new administrative user? Sign up ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services recommends some basic browser configuration settings in order to ensure the most complete functionality while accessing and working within your hosted applications. After  installing Citrix , the following settings will need to be configured for all users in the appropriate browsers: Internet Explorer          Version ... more

There are times when it may be necessary to manually disconnect a user from the hosted environment, such as if the hosted application was closed without a proper logout. But, you may wonder, if the application is already closed – how do you disconnect the user? The steps are outlined below, and can also be found in the Knowledgebase solution, How to ... more

Did you know that Blackbaud Hosting Services has direct Chat Support? No matter the level of complexity, our expert analysts are ready to troubleshoot and resolve your questions through our quick and convenient  Chat Support . What’s so amazing about Chat Support? It’s easy! Go to  Chat Support and choose Hosting Services to chat with a Hosting ... more

Blackbaud's US offices will be closed on Monday, January 18th in observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Our offices will reopen for normal business hours on Tuesday, January 19th. As always, our online Support resources  will remain available to users with active maintenance. Are you new to the hosting environment or a new administrative user? ... more

In this post, we will review some of the common questions about printing from within Blackbaud’s hosted environment. Q: How do I print to other printers in my network? A: For Windows users - The Citrix Universal Printer! The Citrix Universal Printer appears as a standard option in the Printer Setup menu within the hosted application. To use it, simply ... more

Happy New Year from Blackbaud’s Hosting Services team!  Just a reminder that our Holiday Customer Support hours for US Customers this week will have the following exceptions: Thursday, 12/31: Blackbaud Closes at 3pm ET Friday, 1/1: Blackbaud Closed in observance of New Year's DayAlso, our  online Support resources  are always available to users ... more

Happy Holidays to you and yours from Blackbaud’s Hosting Services team!  Just a reminder that our Holiday Customer Support hours for US Customers this week will have the following exceptions: Thursday, 12/24: Blackbaud Closes at 3pm ET Friday, 12/25: Blackbaud Closed in observance of Christmas Also, our online Support resources are always ... more

Administrative users for Blackbaud’s Hosting Services will see the User Administration icon when they log into the hosting portal. The administrative user can click the User Administration icon to view the users and groups for their organization. To add additional hosting users, the administrator can right-click in the white area of the User ... more

The Blackbaud Hosting Services team is currently offering a free webinar geared toward answering common questions about our hosted environment. The webinar is typically scheduled for every other Wednesday at 2:00 PM ET. The webinar is an ideal training tool for users who are new to the Blackbaud Hosting environment or seasoned users who would like a ... more

This post covers the most common questions we receive regarding the passwords for accessing the Blackbaud Hosting Services environment.   What are the password requirements for Blackbaud Hosting Services? They cannot contain all or part of the user’s first name, last name or account name The must be at least 8 characters in length They cannot be one of ... more

The Hosting Services team would like to make you aware of Blackbaud’s Support hours on the Thanksgiving holiday so you and your team can prepare accordingly. On Wednesday, our U.S. offices will close at 3:00 pm ET and reopen on Monday, November 30th in observance of Thanksgiving.  We will continue to provide support for our customers in Canada, ... more

Disk mapping allows users to bypass the hosted Files folder when moving files between the hosted environment and the local machine. More information on this feature can be found in the Knowledgebase solution,  How to export or save files from Blackbaud Hosting Services to your computer or a network location . Note: Network drive access must be enabled ... more

Have you updated the Citrix Receiver installed on your workstation for accessing Blackbaud’s hosted environment? We recommend that all users and workstations are on the current version. Citrix includes fixes relevant to the hosted environment in each subsequent version, as well as improves performance and stability over the older versions. When ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services recommends some basic browser configuration settings in order to ensure the most complete functionality while accessing and working within your hosted applications. After  installing Citrix , the following settings will need to be configured for all users in the appropriate browsers: Internet Explorer          Version ... more

Have you seen the Hosting Services Status Page on blackbaud.com? This page was developed based on your feedback to improve communications and offers an easy location to monitor your hosted product status. The Hosting Services Status Page provides the following benefits: Information on the availability of your hosted products, including details ... more

Have you set up your hosted Edge products so that you are not required to enter a second username and password when logging in? If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your hosted users, we highly recommend this to reduce the number of logins. This form of authentication is highly recommended for Mac users as well. When Windows ... more

There are times when it may be necessary to manually disconnect a user from the hosted environment, such as if the hosted application was closed without a proper logout. But, you may wonder, if the application is already closed – how do you disconnect the user? The steps are outlined below, and can also be found in the Knowledgebase solution, How to ... more

Administrative users for Blackbaud’s Hosting Services will see the User Administration icon when they log into the hosting portal. The administrative user can click the User Administration icon to view the users and groups for their organization. To add additional hosting users, the administrator can right-click in the white area of the User ... more

Information on upcoming maintenance and upgrade schedules, unplanned outages, and important product updates, is sent to our customers from the Blackbaud Hosting Services Communications team. You also have the option to check the status of your hosted application at any time by accessing the Hosting Services Status Page . If you are not receiving ... more

You may be aware by now that you can manually export reports, mail merges and other documents directly to your local drive , but did you know that you can preset these items to do the work for you? Setting these items up to directly save to your local drive will not only save time in the export process, but will also save time having to retrieve documents from ... more

Our current hosted environment is set up in a load-balancing configuration that automatically connects a user to the application server with the least amount of connections when logging in. Each Citrix user in our hosted environment has what is called a “roaming profile” associated with their username. This roaming profile allows the user’s unique ... more

Coming Soon: Blackbaud Hosting Services Login Page is Updating its Look We are excited to announce an update to the Blackbaud Hosting Services website, coming in September.  This feature will include an enhanced user experience that allows Google Chrome users to continue accessing your hosted applications through this browser after Chrome’s ... more

This post covers the most common questions we receive regarding the passwords for accessing the Blackbaud Hosting Services environment.   What are the password requirements for Blackbaud Hosting Services? They cannot contain all or part of the user’s first name, last name or account name The must be at least 8 characters in length They cannot be one of ... more

Did you know that Blackbaud Hosting Services has direct Chat Support? No matter the level of complexity, our expert analysts are ready to troubleshoot and resolve your questions through our quick and convenient  Chat Support . What’s so amazing about Chat Support? It’s easy! Go to  Chat Support and choose Hosting Services to chat with a Hosting ... more

Information on upcoming maintenance and upgrade schedules, unplanned outages, and important product updates, is sent to our customers from the Blackbaud Hosting Services Communications team. You also have the option to check the status of your hosted application at any time by accessing the Hosting Services Status Page . If you are not receiving ... more

Administrative users for Blackbaud’s Hosting Services will see the User Administration icon when they log into the hosting portal. The administrative user can click the User Administration icon to view the users and groups for their organization. To add additional hosting users, the administrator can right-click in the white area of the User ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services recommends some basic browser configuration settings in order to ensure the most complete functionality while accessing and working within your hosted applications. After  installing Citrix , the following settings will need to be configured for all users in the appropriate browsers: Internet Explorer          Version ... more

The Hosting Service department at Blackbaud would like to wish a happy and safe Independence Day to all of our US customers! Blackbaud Hosting Support would also like to remind our customers that Blackbaud’s US offices will be closed in observance of Independence Day this Friday, July 3, 2015. We will resume normal business hours on Monday, July 6 th . ... more

Blackbaud is pleased to announce the next phase of the single sign-on experience with the launch of our Customer Portal. The new portal is accessed by clicking the “my blackbaud” link when logged into www.blackbaud.com . From this page you have access to edit your user profile, view your organization information, manage roles and search ... more

Have you seen the Hosting Services Status Page on blackbaud.com? This page was developed based on your feedback to improve communications and offers an easy location to monitor your hosted product status. The Hosting Services Status Page provides the following benefits: Information on the availability of your hosted products, including details ... more

There are times when it may be necessary to manually disconnect a user from the hosted environment, such as if the hosted application was closed without a proper logout. But, you may wonder, if the application is already closed – how do you disconnect the user? The steps are outlined below, and can also be found in the Knowledgebase solution, How to ... more

Have you set up your hosted Edge products so that you are not required to enter a second username and password when logging in? If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your hosted users, we highly recommend this to reduce the number of logins. This form of authentication is recommended for Mac users as well. When Windows Authentication ... more

You may be aware by now that you can manually export reports, mail merges and other documents directly to your local drive , but did you know that you can preset these items to do the work for you? Setting these items up to directly save to your local drive will not only save time in the export process, but will also save time having to retrieve documents from ... more

Are you new to Blackbaud Hosting Services, frequently train new Hosting users, or simply need a refresher for common tasks in our hosted environment? If so, check out the Blackbaud Hosting Services How-To Page on Blackbaud.com! This page serves as a comprehensive resource for the standard hosting-related tasks for both administrative and regular ... more

If your organization hosts The Raiser’s Edge in Blackbaud Hosting Services, you may have seen a new plug-in when you log into the Hosting landing page. The Blackbaud Product team has created and is deploying a plug-in called the Contact Information Plug-in.  This plug-in will enhance and improve the relationship phone number and email address data ... more

Do you use Chrome to access Blackbaud Hosting Services? If so, you may notice the recent browser update that was pushed out from Google has generated some additional prompts when launching your applications through Citrix. Chrome users may be prompted to choose a file location to save or download a launch.ica file after clicking the application icon ... more

Did you know that Blackbaud has Chat Support? No matter the level of complexity, our expert analysts are ready to troubleshoot and resolve your questions through our quick and convenient  Chat Support . What’s so amazing about Chat Support? It’s easy! Go to  Chat Support  and choose Hosting Services to chat with a Hosting analyst directly. Chat ... more

Recently the version of Crystal Reports components that generate reports from our Edge products was given a much needed update and with this improvement, we have a change to the options users see when previewing and printing reports in our hosted environment. The Print Setup is now only available in the Parameters instead of the Preview. By clicking ... more

Beginning March 9 th , some of our customers started experiencing errors when logging in to Raiser’s Edge, Financial Edge and Education Edge.  When experiencing the error, most users have been able to successfully login after subsequent attempts, but the disruption has raised understandable frustration. We have traced the error to a key ... more

Have you seen the Hosting Services Status Page on blackbaud.com? This page was developed based on your feedback to improve communications and offers an easy location to monitor your hosted product status. The Hosting Services Status Page provides the following benefits: Information on the availability of your hosted products, including details ... more

When was the last time your users updated the Citrix Receiver installed on their workstations for accessing Blackbaud’s hosted environment? We recommend that all users and workstations are on the current version. Citrix includes fixes relevant to the hosted environment in each subsequent version, as well as improves performance and stability ... more

Administrative users for Blackbaud’s Hosting Services will see the User Administration icon when they log into the hosting portal. The administrative user can click the User Administration icon to view the users and groups for their organization. To add additional hosting users, the administrator can right-click in the white area of the User ... more

This post covers the most common questions we receive regarding the passwords for accessing the Blackbaud Hosting Services environment.   What are the password requirements for Blackbaud Hosting Services? They cannot contain all or part of the user’s first name, last name or account name The must be at least 8 characters in length They cannot be one of ... more

One of the benefits of hosting your Blackbaud applications is that we take care of the administrative tasks of creating and saving backups so your IT team doesn't have to. You also don’t have to worry about disaster recovery.  If anything ever happens to your place of business, we can supply a backup of your data, down to a 15 minute window, should you need ... more

In this post, we will review some of the common questions about printing from within Blackbaud’s hosted environment. Q: How do I print to other printers in my network? A: For Windows users - The Citrix Universal Printer! The Citrix Universal Printer appears as a standard option in the Printer Setup menu within the hosted application. To use it, simply ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services recommends some basic browser configuration settings in order to ensure the most complete functionality while accessing and working within your hosted applications. After  installing Citrix , the following settings will need to be configured for all users in the appropriate browsers: Internet Explorer          Version ... more

We recently unveiled the new Hosting Status Page to provide a real-time status of your hosted applications and services, including a single location to see upcoming maintenance windows.  The Status Page was created based on your feedback, and we've tweaked our processes to speed up the delivery of information to the page.  Below are the ways of ... more

Information on upcoming maintenance and upgrade schedules, unplanned outages, and important product updates, is sent to our customers from the Blackbaud Hosting Services Communications team. You also have the option to check the status of your hosted application at any time by accessing the Hosting Services Status Page . If you are not receiving ... more

As your organizations are getting back into the swing of things after the holidays and working toward your 2015 goals, we would like to remind you of some of the ways to streamline your processes in the Blackbaud Hosting environment. Windows Authentication: When Windows Authentication is enabled and the user clicks the hosted application icon, the ... more

Happy Holidays to you and yours from Blackbaud’s Hosting Services team!  Just a reminder that our Holiday Support hours are covered in this blog post . more

Happy holidays!  During the holiday season, we will be closed on: Thursday, December 25, in observance of Christmas. For cases created after 3:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, December 24, we will follow up with you on Friday, December 26. Thursday, January 1 for New Year’s. For cases created after 3:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, December 31, we will follow up with you ... more

Have you ever needed to change your Blackbaud Hosting Services password, but when prompted realize you do not have the “old password” because it was stored in your browser? Some browsers actually offer the ability to view these saved passwords within their settings. Users in Firefox can view this previously-saved password using the below steps: Open ... more

Did you know that you no longer need to use the Files Folder to export/import to and from local drives? Not all users know about disk mapping, which allows users to bypass the Files Folder when moving files between the hosted environment and the local machine. More information on this feature can be found in the Knowledgebase solution with video demo, ... more

The Hosting Services team would like to make you aware of Blackbaud’s Support hours next week so you and your team can prepare accordingly. On Monday and Tuesday we will be open and available during our regular hours.  On Wednesday, our U.S. offices will close at 3:00 pm ET and reopen on Monday, December 1 in observance of Thanksgiving.  We will continue ... more

When printing from your hosted application from a Windows workstation, it’s important to use the Citrix Universal Printer (CUP) for best results.  Below we share additional information about this option, which allows for more functionality and efficiency than the application’s default settings.  Please share with your team! Update the version ... more

Protecting your data is one of the Blackbaud Hosting Services team’s top priority.  With that in mind, we wanted to share the requirements and some additional information for passwords to access your hosted applications. We’ve instituted fairly complex password requirements, which must meet several criteria.  Requirements are covered in the ... more

We’ve recently unveiled the new Hosting Status Page to provide a real-time status of your hosted applications and services, including a single location to see upcoming maintenances.  The Status Page was created based on your feedback, and we’ve tweaked our processes to speed up the delivery of information to the page.  Below are the ways of accessing ... more

Recently, a team of security researchers announced a vulnerability named POODLE which affects SSL 3.0, the protocol most commonly used to secure transmission of sensitive data on the web.  This vulnerability was announced on October 14, 2014 and as of right now, no patches have been released by our vendors. During an emergency maintenance window ... more

The Service Delivery Operations and Hosting Support teams would like to say a huge THANK YOU to all the BBCON 2014 attendees who stopped by the Blackbaud Hosting Services booth!  We know it can be challenging to take the time out of your busy schedules to attend BBCON and we hope you enjoyed the sessions and the Expo as much as we did! Post Conference ... more

Did you know you can set up your hosted Edge products so that you are not required to enter a second username and password when logging in? If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your hosted users, we highly recommend this to reduce the number of logins. This form of authentication is highly recommended for Mac users as well. When Windows ... more

When was the last time your users updated the Citrix Receiver installed on their workstations for accessing Blackbaud’s hosted environment? We recommend that all users and workstations are on the current version. Citrix includes fixes relevant to the hosted environment in each subsequent version, as well as improves performance and stability ... more

Information on upcoming maintenance and upgrade schedules, unplanned outages, and important news, such as the announcement of the Hosting Services Status Page , is sent to our customers from the Blackbaud Hosting Services Communications team. If you are not receiving these email notifications, it is possible that you may not be setup to receive ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services is excited to announce our new Hosting Services Status Page ( Beta ) on blackbaud.com to improve communications!  This page was developed based on your feedback and will offer an easy location to monitor your hosted product status. Provides information on the availability of your hosted products, including details on ... more

Administrative users for Blackbaud’s Hosting Services will see the User Administration icon when they log into the hosting portal. The administrative user can click the User Administration icon to view the users and groups for their organization. To add additional hosting users, the administrator can right-click in the white area of the User ... more

We invite you to read more about the new Knowledgebase changes happening here in Support. Check it out:   New Knowledgebase Changes . If you want to be in the know, make sure to   subscribe   to our Support News blog! more

Within the Hosted Edge products users are able to set up functionality to send emails from within the product, and even access their Outlook account from directly within the hosted environment. The option best for your organization depends largely on the needs of your users. If users only need to be able to send emails from the application (for example– ... more

This blog post will review best practices for printing successfully from the hosted environment, as well as how to contact us and what information we need if you have any additional questions about printing. Update the version of the Citrix Receiver . This link will take you to our previous post regarding the new version. When new versions have been ... more

Did you know there are several different timeout settings in Blackbaud Hosting Services? This is to ensure safety for client databases as well as to control the use of server resources and licenses. These timeout settings include the Blackbaud Hosting Services Web Portal and individual application sessions that are established when launching ... more

This blog post will review best practices for printing successfully from the hosted environment, as well as how to contact us and what information we need if you have any additional questions about printing. Update the version of the Citrix Receiver . This link will take you to our previous post regarding the new version. When new versions have been ... more

This post covers the most common questions we receive regarding the passwords for accessing the Blackbaud Hosting Services environment. What are the password requirements for Blackbaud Hosting Services? Passwords cannot contain all or part of the user’s first name, last name or account name Passwords must be at least 8 characters in length They ... more

The Blackbaud Hosting Services team is currently offering a free bi-weekly webinar geared toward answering common questions about our hosted environment. This webinar is scheduled Wednesdays at 2:00 PM ET and is an ideal training tool for users who are new to the Blackbaud Hosting environment or seasoned users who would like a refresher on best ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services is excited to announce our new Hosting Services Status Page on blackbaud.com!  This page was developed based on your feedback and will offer an easy location to monitor your hosted product status. View a new feature on blackbaud.com to improve communications Learn about maintenance windows, system incidents and more ... more

The Hosting Service department at Blackbaud would like to wish a happy and safe Independence Day to all of our US customers! Blackbaud Hosting Support would also like to remind our customers that Blackbaud’s US offices will be closed in observance of Independence Day this Friday, July 4, 2014. We will resume normal business hours on Monday, July 7 th . ... more

Have you started using the local disk mapping option in our hosted data centers? Disk mapping allows users to bypass the hosted Files folder when moving files between the hosted environment and the local machine. More information on this feature can be found in the Knowledgebase solution,  How to directly export files from Blackbaud Hosting Services ... more

Did you know you can set up your hosted Edge products so that you are not required to enter a second set of credentials when logging in? If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your hosted users, we highly recommend this to reduce the number of logins. This means that when you click the application icon, the application will not ask you for a ... more

Firefox automatic updates has released version 30. This update may have deactivated the Citrix plug-in for hosted users. The steps below go over how to re-activate the Citrix plug-in if Firefox users are unable to launch their hosted applications after the update. Open Firefox Click the Open menu button (three line at the top right under the X to close ... more

Are you new to Blackbaud Hosting Services, frequently train new Hosting users, or simply need a refresher for common tasks in our hosted environment? If so, check out our recently updated Blackbaud Hosting Services How-To Page on Blackbaud.com! This page serves as a comprehensive resource for the standard hosting-related tasks for both ... more

For many of our customers the school year is winding down and end-of-the year processes are quickly approaching. This post will review some of the common efficiency tools we recommend for our Hosted environment, which may save you some time during this busy season. Windows Authentication – If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your ... more

Have you recently reviewed the contact roles for your users on Blackbaud.com ? Your Blackbaud.com user roles indicate which software programs you use and if you are a  primary contact ,  site administrator  or invoice contact for your organization. Your organization's site administrators can add, remove, or change Blackbaud.com user roles in ... more

When was the last time you updated the Citrix Receiver installed on your workstation for accessing Blackbaud’s hosted environment? We recommend that all users and workstations are on the current version. Citrix includes fixes relevant to the hosted environment in each subsequent version, as well as improves performance and stability over the ... more

Are you new to our Hosting Services? Are you a long-time user who would like a refresher on the resources for setting up and using the hosting environment? Our Hosting Support team has put together a comprehensive Knowledgebase solution with demo videos of all the common tasks for users and administrators accessing our hosted environment. You may find ... more

One of the Blackbaud Hosting Services team’s most important priorities is security, and as such we wanted to fill you in on the Use-After-Free vulnerability that was discovered with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer versions 6 through 11 ( see Microsoft’s official security advisory here ) . We wanted to share some important items regarding this ... more

In this post we will review some best practices for managing your Citrix user accounts.  Citrix users in the Admins group are able to complete the following user management tasks for their organization:  adding or deleting users, resetting passwords, assigning to groups, and marking as inactive. Below we will discuss the 3 most common tasks in ... more

Many of you may have recently heard about the vulnerability named the “Heartbleed bug” (CVE‑2014‑0160) announced by a team of security researchers. This potential security risk affects SSL, the protocol most commonly used to secure transmission of sensitive data on the web, from credit cards to personal information, and the very keys that protects ... more

With Microsoft ending support of its long running operating system, Windows XP, on April 8 th , we wanted to share some additional resources to help with the transition. As a reminder, here is our previous post . In addition, we wanted to point interested users to this Knowledgebase solution , which includes helpful links to Microsoft resources.  Our ... more

Does Blackbaud host your Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC) or Sphere instance?  If so, please review the post below thoroughly, as an important process has recently changed. Recently, Blackbaud’s SSL certificate provider, GeoTrust, changed the requirements for renewing certificates.  Blackbaud is still responsible for renewing your ... more

One of the benefits of having Blackbaud host your applications is that we take care of the administrative tasks of creating and saving backups so your IT team doesn’t have to. You also don’t have to worry about disaster recovery.  If anything ever happens to your place of business, we can supply a backup of your data, down to a 15 minute window, should you ... more

This blog post will review best practices for printing successfully from the hosted environment, as well as how to contact us and what information we need if you have any additional questions about printing. Update the version of the Citrix Receiver . This link will take you to our previous post regarding the new version. When new versions have been ... more

Our current hosted environment is set up in a load-balancing configuration that automatically connects a user to the application server with the least amount of connections when logging in. Each Citrix user in our hosted environment has what is called a “roaming profile” associated with their username. This roaming profile allows the user’s unique ... more

There are times when it may be necessary to manually disconnect a user from the hosted environment, such as if the hosted application was closed without a proper logout. But, you may wonder, if the application is already closed – how do you disconnect the user? The steps are outlined below, and can also be found in the Knowledgebase solution, How to ... more

According to the Microsoft website , “After 12 years, support for Windows XP will end on April 8, 2014. There will be no more security updates or technical support for the Windows XP operating system. It is very important that customers and partners migrate to a modern operating system such as Windows 8.1.” Support for Office 2003 will be ending on this ... more

Our Hosting Services team has recently completed testing compatibility with Citrix Receiver version 4.1 for Windows and will soon be updating the links to make this version available on the data center landing pages under the Log In section: You can also download version 4.1 for Windows directly from the Citrix website . We recommend that all users and ... more

If you have ever contacted Customer Support with a Hosting Services question, then you have most likely been put in touch with a member of our Hosting Support team. This team works with any of our hosted customers accessing our applications via Citrix. Although we normally use this blog for tips, tricks and information about our Hosting Services ... more

Did you know that in addition to this blog and our Knowledgebase , Blackbaud has many additional online resources for our hosted customers? Several of our teams, including Hosting Support and Hosting Implementation have put together these resources to assist existing users as well as new customers with the transition to Blackbaud Hosting Services. ... more

Recently Blackbaud Hosting Services sent out an email communication to all our users of The Raiser’s Edge, The Education Edge and The Financial Edge to confirm the complete rollout of disk mapping in our data centers. We wanted to highlight a couple of questions we have received as users have enabled this functionality. Disk mapping allows users to ... more

Last week we highlighted the basic Outlook integration that is already set up by default in our hosted environment. For our customers who would prefer to have access to their contacts, calendar, etc… we also have the option for Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTPS) integration. In addition to sending emails and adding those emails as actions, this ... more

Did you know your hosted Edge products (The Raiser’s Edge, The Financial Edge and The Education Edge) are already configured for Outlook Integration? Every database is configured for the basic SMTP Relay Outlook integration during the hosting services implementation process. SMTP Relay Outlook integration allows users to send emails out of the ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services would like to wish all of you a very Happy New Year! We are looking forward to another year of partnering with you, our hosted customers, while you work hard to accomplish your mission! We are also excited about several initiatives that are in the works to make your experience in our hosted environment the best yet. As these are ... more

Blackbaud’s Hosting Support and the Service Delivery Operations department would like to wish Happy Holidays to you and your families! We would also like to remind our users that Blackbaud’s Support offices will be closed in observance of the Christmas holiday beginning at 3:00 pm ET on Tuesday, December 24, through Wednesday, December 25. Our ... more

This post is a review of the various resources that our Hosting Support and Service Delivery Operations teams have put together to provide users with assistance answering any questions that may come up while working in our hosted environment. The majority of these resources can even be accessed directly from the Hosting Services landing page:  From ... more

Q: How many data centers does Blackbaud have? A: Blackbaud has 4 data centers in North America (Boston, MA, Orange County, CA, Austin, TX, and Vancouver, BC), as well as a new data center in Sydney, Australia. These data centers allow us to meet the geographical needs for your hosted applications, as well as deliver the disaster recovery and business ... more

Has your organization recently updated to Internet Explorer 11 (IE11), or are you planning to update soon? With the latest version of Internet Explorer we have discovered a couple of changes to the way IE interacts with the Hosting Services environment. This blog post will cover some things you may encounter and the setting changes to resolve them. You ... more

The Blackbaud Hosting Services team wishes you and your families a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. As a reminder, please review our previous post for information on Blackbaud's Support hours for this week (as well as the upcoming Christmas and New Year holiday schedule). We also wanted to remind you that next Tuesday, December 3rd, is Giving ... more

The holiday season is quickly approaching and the Hosting Services team would like to provide the information below regarding update schedules and Customer Support hours, for your reference: Hosting Services grey out dates for updates: November 25 th – December 3 rd December 21 st – January 4 th During these times, all standard maintenance will be ... more

Did you know that one of the biggest benefits of having Blackbaud host your applications is that we take care of the administrative tasks of creating and saving backups so your IT team doesn’t have to? You also don’t have to worry about disaster recovery.  If anything ever happens to your place of business, we can supply a backup of your data, down to a 15 ... more

A common misconception with Blackbaud Hosting Services is that the credentials for accessing the Hosting Services Web Portal and the credentials for a hosted application are the same. In reality, the login process for accessing the Hosting Services Web Portal and the hosted application are not linked, though it is possible to give a usernames and ... more

Did you know there are several different timeout features in Blackbaud Hosting Services? This is to ensure safety for client databases as well as to control the use of server resources and licenses. These timeout settings include the Blackbaud Hosting Services Web Portal and individual user application sessions that are established when launching ... more

Are you ever curious about Blackbaud Hosting Services’ notification procedures? We send email communications notifying our customers of scheduled maintenance or any issues that could potentially affect their organization. Maintenance notifications follow the following schedule: Standard maintenance notifications are sent at least 72 ... more

One of the top priorities of Blackbaud Hosting Services is to provide a continuous, secure environment to our customers by protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. Our process starts with a regular assessment of risks. Then, we undergo rigorous monitoring and testing, both internally and externally using qualified ... more

We invited all of the guests at the BBCON Hosting Services booth to enter our drawing to win one of two Kindle Fire HDs or an iPad mini. The following winners were drawn on the last day of the conference: Kindle Fire HD: Amy Bossett from The Nature Conservancy Kindle Fire HD: Matthew Gorski from Spectrum Health Foundation iPad mini: David Nitshe from West ... more

The Service Delivery Operations and Hosting Support teams would like to say a huge THANK YOU to all the BBCON 2013 attendees who stopped by the Blackbaud Hosting Services booth.  We know it can be challenging to take the time out of your busy schedules to attend BBCON and we hope you enjoyed the sessions and the Expo as much as we did! Post Conference ... more

Blackbaud Hosting Services will have a booth in the Nonprofit Expo at the Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits next week.  Members of our management and executive leadership teams will be present, as well as our colleagues in Support and Sales. Please come by and say hello – we would love to meet you! We will be happy to answer questions, provide live ... more

In less than a month the annual Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits, or BBCON, will be held in Washington, D.C. – will you be there? If you have not already registered, it’s not too late! Information on registration and much more, including sessions, agenda, and travel details, can be found on the BBCON website . Blackbaud Hosting Services will have a ... more

Many users of Blackbaud Hosting Services have questions about how the hosting environment is different from the local environment, or how to perform specific functions within hosting. Here are some of the tools we have highlighted this year to make the transition easier, as well as some helpful additional resources: User Management: For ... more

Q: What is the Files Folder? A: Blackbaud’s hosting servers have a Files folder location for temporary file storage while moving information between your hosted application and your local environment. Each unique Hosting username is allocated 100MB of space within their organization’s folder. It is important to note that this is designed to be ... more

The Blackbaud NetCommunity Products team is excited to announce the release of the latest update to BBNC– version 6.55 (3.11.526, patch 2). You can also check out our Blackbaud NetCommunity blog to read about some of the new features and changes in this version! The hosting server administrators have begun rolling out this new version out in waves, ... more

Just a reminder – if you have not already attended a free introductory webinar for Blackbaud Hosting Services, it’s not too late! The webinars take place every Wednesday at 2:00 PM ET and are approximately 45 minutes in length. To register, visit Blackbaud.com's Webinars page and select the Hosting Services category. Simply click 'Register Now' next ... more

Hello, I am the VP of Service Delivery Operations for Blackbaud. The folks making up Service Delivery Operations at Blackbaud are extremely passionate and committed to our clients and their missions. Our team and the service they provide are second to none. No one knows Blackbaud products and services like those who create and provide them. Our ... more

The Blackbaud Hosting Services team is currently offering a weekly webinar geared toward answering common questions about our hosted environment. The webinar is scheduled for every Wednesday at 2:00 PM ET. These webinars are ideal for users who are new to the Blackbaud Hosting environment, as well as Administrative users who have questions about ... more

Some of the most common questions we receive regarding Blackbaud Hosting Services involve how to print successfully from the hosted environment. This blog post will review the best practices for printing, as well as how to contact us, and what information we need, if you have any additional questions about printing. If your organization has both an ... more

The Hosting Service department at Blackbaud would like to wish a happy and safe Independence Day to all of our US customers! Blackbaud Hosting Support would also like to remind our customers that Blackbaud’s US offices will be closed in observance of Independence Day this Thursday, July 4, 2013. We will resume normal business hours on Friday, July 5 th . ... more

Did you know you can install or update the most recently approved Citrix Receiver from our Hosting landing page? The landing page for each data center has been updated with the supported downloads for Citrix Receiver 3.4 (Windows) and 11.7 (Mac). We recommend that all users are on the current version, as Citrix includes fixes relevant to the hosted ... more

In this post, we will answer some of the common questions we receive from administrators about managing their hosted users. Q: How do I reset a user’s password? A: There are three options for resetting a user’s password: -          Primary contacts and site administrators for all hosted organizations can reset Citrix passwords and unlock user ... more

Are you new to the Blackbaud Hosting environment? Are you an administrator at your organization with questions about adding new users or resetting passwords? The Blackbaud Hosting Services team is excited to share with you our new Blackbaud Hosting Services webinar! Currently, the webinar is scheduled for every Wednesday at 2:00 PM ET, beginning on ... more

Have you ever wondered what changes are made to your hosted products when they are updated by our administrators? If so, we have recently made the Release Notes and Readmes for version and patch updates available to our Hosted customers. These can be easily accessed from the FAQ section of the Blackbaud Hosting Services landing page: After clicking the ... more

That’s right! Our latest tutorial videos are now available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. These videos include: How to install Citrix, How to add new Hosting accounts, How to reset user passwords, How to use the files folder and many more! The videos are easily searchable online. If you would like to view them all, please visit our Blackbaud ... more

For many of our customers the school year is winding down and end-of-year processes are quickly approaching. This post will review some of the common efficiency tools we recommend for our Hosted environment, which may save you some time during this busy season. Windows Authentication If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your ... more

If you have ever had any questions about printing, you may find the tips and tricks in this blog post helpful to ensure you are able to successfully print from Blackbaud Hosting Services. If your organization has both an Edge product and a Blackbaud NetCommunity or Online Campus Community product, make sure you are only printing from the regular The ... more

If you are looking for time-saving shortcuts in Blackbaud’s hosted environment, then the products offered by our partner, Omatic Software , may be able to help. Omatic Software provides efficiency solutions designed exclusively for users of Blackbaud’s software.  From enhanced importing and event management to advanced segmentation, check ... more

Due to the PCI security requirements, Citrix passwords for our hosted users expire every 90 days. After 75 days users will begin to see a prompt notifying them of the upcoming password expiration. If the password is not reset within 90 days, the Change Password screen will appear at the next login. Users have the ability to reset their password at any time ... more

Our customers know that it is vitally important to protect the personal information of their donors as well as comply with the PCI standards put in place by the credit card industry to prevent identity theft. This is why the responsibility for the security of the data is a top priority for Blackbaud. It also allows your organization to leave the security ... more

As part of Blackbaud’s commitment to our hosted customers, we regularly update hosted products to the latest available versions. We do extensive testing in our hosted environment to ensure compatibility and update the hosted databases within 30 days of the general release. This commitment and the windows for update notifications are outlined in ... more

Have you noticed Maintenance Notification emails describing Critical MS Patching?  Each month, Microsoft releases new server security patches. Based on industry standards, we have a small time frame to deploy these patches in order to maintain security and PCI compliance. Each organization will be affected by at least one maintenance window to ... more

As part of our commitment to our hosted customers, the Blackbaud Hosting Services team performs product version and patch updates during our regular maintenance windows. Notifications of scheduled updates come from our communications team. If you are not receiving the communications, please see our previous post, How to receive communications ... more

Information on upcoming maintenance, upgrade schedules, unplanned outages, and important news is sent to our customers from the Blackbaud Hosting Services Communications team. If you are not receiving these email notifications, it is possible that you may not be setup to receive them, they are being blocked on your internal email server as spam, ... more

As outlined in the System Requirements , the supported operating systems for basic Blackbaud Hosting Services are: Note: At this time, Windows 8, which was released on October 26, 2012, is not a supported operating system for Blackbaud Hosting Services. If your organization has multiple products, please refer to the System Requirements directly, ... more

One of the most popular requests from our Hosted users is the ability to connect directly to local drives on the user’s machine. Our Hosting team has been dedicated to bringing this functionality to our users, and we have great news – it's coming this month! What does this mean to your organization? When Exporting, Importing, and running Reports or ... more

Have you been looking for a way to contact our Hosting Support staff directly?  Well now you can!  We just rolled out Chat Support for Hosting Services.  If you would like to reach out to our Hosting Support Team with a quick question, click chat with support  on the bottom of any  blackbaud.com  page. Note:   You will be prompted to log in to access chat. ... more

In this post, we will answer some of the most common questions we get from users about printing from within Blackbaud’s hosted environment. Q: How do I print to other printers in my network? A: For Windows users - The Citrix Universal Printer! The Citrix Universal Printer appears as a standard option in the Printer Setup menu within the hosted ... more

If you are looking for time-saving shortcuts in Blackbaud’s hosted environment, then the products offered by our partner, Omatic Software, may be able to help. This is the third in a series of posts to provide an overview of the Omatic Software product integrations that are available in the Blackbaud Application Hosting environment. Information on ... more

When Blackbaud hosts both The Raiser’s Edge and a Blackbaud NetCommunity product, such as Spark, users will see two icons for The Raiser’s Edge when logging into the hosted Citrix portal: A common question we receive is ‘which of these icons do we use?’ The two icons appear identical and the applications look identical.  So what is the difference ... more

If you are looking for time-saving shortcuts in Blackbaud’s hosted environment, then the products offered by our partner, Omatic Software, may be able to help. This is the second in a series of posts to provide an overview of the Omatic Software product integrations that are available in the Blackbaud Application Hosting environment. Information on ... more