End of School Year Efficiency Tools for Hosting Services

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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.

  2. Windows Authentication – If you haven’t already set up Windows Authentication for your hosted users, we highly recommend this to reduce the number of logins. Essentially this ensures that when you click the application icon, the application does not ask you for a second set of credentials; it authenticates against your Citrix credentials and automatically launches the program. To set this up, each user must have a unique Citrix username/password, as well as a username/password in the hosted application. The following Knowledgebase solution goes over the setup for this for both RE and EE/FE and includes a demo video: How to allow users to log into an application without entering a password using Windows Authentication in the hosted environment (includes a demo video)

  3. Local Disk Mapping – 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 our previous post, Are You Using Local Disk Mapping in Blackbaud Hosting Services?, and the Knowledgebase solution, How to directly export files from Blackbaud Hosting Services to your local computer (BB739515)


  4. Timeouts – There are several different timeouts in the Hosted environment. There is a 15-minute timeout from the main Hosting landing page. This timeout logs out of the landing page, but does not disconnect you from an open hosted application. There is a 60-minute inactivity timeout for the hosted application servers. If a user has a hosted application open and idle for 60 minutes, the server will disconnect the session. There is also a 15-minute timeout in The Raiser’s Edge for users with Supervisor rights. You may want to review the user groups in The Raiser’s Edge to determine if you can remove the full Supervisor rights and/or rights to Admin > Security for any of those groups in order to eliminate the 15-minute timeout for non-supervisor users.  This information can also be found in the Knowledgebase solution, The Raiser’s Edge in Blackbaud Application Hosting times out after 15 minutes of inactivity


  5. Printing – For tips and tricks specific to printing, you may also want to review our previous blog post, Hosting Services Refresher: Printing.

 

If you have questions or need assistance with any of the above tools, please create a case on Case Central, choose your product, and select the Blackbaud Application Hosting topic or chat with our Hosting Support team.

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News ARCHIVED | Hosting Blog 05/29/2014 11:28pm EDT
Added by Michelle McLaughlin
  

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