Experiment invitation: RENXT Sandbox environment for creating Add-ins and more
Published
TL;DR
For a limited time, all SKY Developers are invited to receive free access to an RENXT environment to try out making SKY Add-ins and basic read-only SKY API applications.
Interested SKY Developers can request an invitation to this RENXT environment by messaging Paul Gibson via the community with the name of your SKY Developer application that has an Add-in defined.
Details
Today we are inviting interested members of the SKY Developer community to an experiment that we are launching based on things we have been hearing from the community. Specifically, we have received consistent feedback on a couple of topics:
Today, there is significant friction in getting started as a SKY Developer due to the need to obtain access to an existing live environment to execute your code. If for example you aren't an actual user in an RENXT environment, then there is not much you can do as a SKY Developer looking to build something for RENXT. Your options are to either be granted access by a real customer or to become a partner and get a dedicated paid partner environment. Those routes to gain environment access are fine for certain classes of SKY Developers, such as those employed or commissioned by a customer or those that are larger partners with the financial ability to afford a dedicated environment. However, for someone just learning about Blackbaud who is not currently affiliated with a specific customer and not yet ready to make a financial commitment as a partner, this need to gain access is too high of a barrier to get started.
Add-ins
SKY Add-ins allow developers to build complementary features that integrate deeply within the user interface of Blackbaud's solutions. For example, with Add-ins you can add custom tiles to selected pages in the system, perhaps bringing in data from external systems that is contextually relevant. Many in the community are raving about the "Joy" of creating Add-ins and the cool things they are able to build with them. And from an end user standpoint, Add-ins are great because they appear right in the existing Blackbaud experience that the customer is already interacting with, minimizing the need to learn about an external int
erface or login to yet another system. You can learn about Add-ins here .
In contrast to the difficulty in getting access to an environment, the barrier to entry for making an Add-in is relatively low. Since Add-ins use a browser-based technology, you can light up an Add-in UX without even needing any real backend. Just serve up some html with a small bit of JavaScript to interact with the Blackbaud SKY Add-in front end library and you can get an Add-in working running from your own machine at a localhost address, no server required. You don't need to master the SKY API OAuth protocol to get started and you may not even need to make SKY API calls at all, depending on what your Add-in does. For example, we have some partners that have created Add-ins that add tiles to the RENXT Constituent record with data from the partner's systems. Those Add-ins doesn't need to make any SKY API calls because they use the current Constituent record id as a key to fetch data directly from the partner's system. Those examples are powerful and yet super simple because the partners did not have to master SKY API at all, just the front-end Add-in framework, which is handled in a simple library. In summary, what our partners have demonstrated is that Add-ins provide an alternative, low barrier approach to an integration. The screenshot below of our preview App Marketplace shows some of the Add-in apps that our partners have created.
Thank you to everyone who has been providing this feedback - letting us know what is challenging in addition to what is working well for you.
In response to this feedback, today we are announcing an experiment that we are inviting everyone in the community to participate in.
Introducing the SKY Developer Cohort Environment
We want every SKY Developer to get instant, easy access to a working environment where they can develop solutions and try their code out. In order to support doing that in a scalable way, we have created something we call the SKY Developer Cohort Environment. We are starting with a real Raiser's Edge NXT environment and we are going to allow any SKY Developer that is interested to have access to this environment.
When granted access to this environment, you will be able to immediately engage as a developer in the following ways:
1. You will get access as a user to a working, production instance of The Raiser’s Edge NXT.
Your user account will have a limited set of permissions, such as read-only access to the non-administrative features of the product.
You can sign into renxt.blackbaud.com, search for and navigate to Constituent Record pages and explore the application and help content as all of our real paying customer users do.
2. You will get access to a preview of our App Marketplace where you can browse a catalog of some of the SKY Applications that our partners have created that customers are already using today. See the screenshot below.
3. You will be able to author and deploy live, working SKY Add-Ins into this environment so that you can see working versions of interactive content that you author rendered inline in the live working production application.
Since your permissions will be non-administrative, these Add-ins will be “virtualized” so that only your developer account will see them. You won’t see other developer’s add-ins and other developer will not see yours, even though you are sharing an environment.
4. You will be able to use our interactive SKY API Console reference tool that let you invoke real SKY API calls using an interactive web page.
5. You will be able to make real, working SKY API calls from your application with the same set of permissions that your user account has (a limited set of read-only rights) in this SKY Developer Cohort environment.
Our hypothesis is that those 5 abilities lower the barrier to you getting started making compelling solutions with Raiser’s Edge NXT. In particular, the ability to make live SKY API calls and create working SKY Add-ins means you can build real things working in a real production environment. We have even created a new, streamlined Getting Started tutorial for Add-Ins that is specifically targeted for developers who accept the invite to the SKY Developer Cohort environment. If you haven't tried your hand at making an Add-In before then you may find this new tutorial an easy on ramp. Check it out here.
A few caveats about where we are with this idea:
This is an experiment. Depending on what we learn, we may decide this was a bad idea, or we may decide it needs more work. So, we offer no guarantees at this time for how long we may make this environment available. We’re optimistic it is a good start, and if that optimism pans out then we hope to make it a formal, documented part of our officially SKY Developer program and developer user onboarding. However, as I write this in March 2020, we aren’t ready to commit to that yet.
You may be thinking: Sounds good, what is the catch?
No catch, really, but this is an experiment and so we are establishing some criteria for participants and a few ground rules.
1. This is an experiment - don't bank your business or partnership on this. We may decide to end this experiment on short notice. We may end it for an individual developer or for all developers, depending on what we learn. Today's invitation should not be interpreted as an infinite grant of access to this environment.
2. We are starting with RENXT. We must start somewhere, and we chose RENXT. If this works well, we will look to expand to other products at a later date.
3. Your user account in this environment has read-only access to a subset of data. While we think you can do a lot of compelling things just with read access, including making compelling Add-ins, we recognize there may be limits. However, restricting to read access helps us control the scope and variables in our experiment so we are standing firm on that for this first iteration.
4. To be eligible to participate in this iteration we are requiring that you demonstrate your interest in making Add-ins by making at least one SKY Application with at least 1 Add-in for an RENT extension point. You can do this in the developer portal under My Applications using the steps described in the Register Add-in help documentation here .
If this sounds interesting to you, and you are cool with the rules and criteria (especially note #4 about demonstrating you can fill out the registration form), then please message me via the community and include the name of one of your applications that has an Add-in (even if it is a placeholder). I will then send you a standard RENXT user invite which you can accept and begin exploring.
I hope you’ll take a chance with us and try it out, and I look forward to hearing from the community at large about what you think about this idea. We want to hear your feedback on this - get in there, play around, build cool stuff, let us know if this unblocks scenarios for you, let us know if you're still stuck because of {thing we should improve}"
App Marketplace preview screenshot featuring Apps that have SKY Add-ins
(This Blog announcement is an update of an earlier discussion posted in the General category)
Today we are inviting interested members of the SKY Developer community to an experiment that we are launching based on things we have been hearing from the community. Specifically, we have received consistent feedback on a couple of topics:
- We’ve heard that access to an environment is important, but in practice it is difficult.
- Separately, you’ve told us that SKY Add-ins are amazing!
Today, there is significant friction in getting started as a SKY Developer due to the need to obtain access to an existing live environment to execute your code. If for example you aren't an actual user in an RENXT environment, then there is not much you can do as a SKY Developer looking to build something for RENXT. Your options are to either be granted access by a real customer or to become a partner and get a dedicated paid partner environment. Those routes to gain environment access are fine for certain classes of SKY Developers, such as those employed or commissioned by a customer or those that are larger partners with the financial ability to afford a dedicated environment. However, for someone just learning about Blackbaud who is not currently affiliated with a specific customer and not yet ready to make a financial commitment as a partner, this need to gain access is too high of a barrier to get started.
Add-ins
SKY Add-ins allow developers to build complementary features that integrate deeply within the user interface of Blackbaud's solutions. For example, with Add-ins you can add custom tiles to selected pages in the system, perhaps bringing in data from external systems that is contextually relevant. Many in the community are raving about the "Joy" of creating Add-ins and the cool things they are able to build with them. And from an end user standpoint, Add-ins are great because they appear right in the existing Blackbaud experience that the customer is already interacting with, minimizing the need to learn about an external int
erface or login to yet another system. You can learn about Add-ins here .
In contrast to the difficulty in getting access to an environment, the barrier to entry for making an Add-in is relatively low. Since Add-ins use a browser-based technology, you can light up an Add-in UX without even needing any real backend. Just serve up some html with a small bit of JavaScript to interact with the Blackbaud SKY Add-in front end library and you can get an Add-in working running from your own machine at a localhost address, no server required. You don't need to master the SKY API OAuth protocol to get started and you may not even need to make SKY API calls at all, depending on what your Add-in does. For example, we have some partners that have created Add-ins that add tiles to the RENXT Constituent record with data from the partner's systems. Those Add-ins doesn't need to make any SKY API calls because they use the current Constituent record id as a key to fetch data directly from the partner's system. Those examples are powerful and yet super simple because the partners did not have to master SKY API at all, just the front-end Add-in framework, which is handled in a simple library. In summary, what our partners have demonstrated is that Add-ins provide an alternative, low barrier approach to an integration. The screenshot below of our preview App Marketplace shows some of the Add-in apps that our partners have created.
Thank you to everyone who has been providing this feedback - letting us know what is challenging in addition to what is working well for you.
In response to this feedback, today we are announcing an experiment that we are inviting everyone in the community to participate in.
Introducing the SKY Developer Cohort Environment
We want every SKY Developer to get instant, easy access to a working environment where they can develop solutions and try their code out. In order to support doing that in a scalable way, we have created something we call the SKY Developer Cohort Environment. We are starting with a real Raiser's Edge NXT environment and we are going to allow any SKY Developer that is interested to have access to this environment.
When granted access to this environment, you will be able to immediately engage as a developer in the following ways:
1. You will get access as a user to a working, production instance of The Raiser’s Edge NXT.
Your user account will have a limited set of permissions, such as read-only access to the non-administrative features of the product.
You can sign into renxt.blackbaud.com, search for and navigate to Constituent Record pages and explore the application and help content as all of our real paying customer users do.
2. You will get access to a preview of our App Marketplace where you can browse a catalog of some of the SKY Applications that our partners have created that customers are already using today. See the screenshot below.
3. You will be able to author and deploy live, working SKY Add-Ins into this environment so that you can see working versions of interactive content that you author rendered inline in the live working production application.
Since your permissions will be non-administrative, these Add-ins will be “virtualized” so that only your developer account will see them. You won’t see other developer’s add-ins and other developer will not see yours, even though you are sharing an environment.
4. You will be able to use our interactive SKY API Console reference tool that let you invoke real SKY API calls using an interactive web page.
5. You will be able to make real, working SKY API calls from your application with the same set of permissions that your user account has (a limited set of read-only rights) in this SKY Developer Cohort environment.
Our hypothesis is that those 5 abilities lower the barrier to you getting started making compelling solutions with Raiser’s Edge NXT. In particular, the ability to make live SKY API calls and create working SKY Add-ins means you can build real things working in a real production environment. We have even created a new, streamlined Getting Started tutorial for Add-Ins that is specifically targeted for developers who accept the invite to the SKY Developer Cohort environment. If you haven't tried your hand at making an Add-In before then you may find this new tutorial an easy on ramp. Check it out here.
A few caveats about where we are with this idea:
This is an experiment. Depending on what we learn, we may decide this was a bad idea, or we may decide it needs more work. So, we offer no guarantees at this time for how long we may make this environment available. We’re optimistic it is a good start, and if that optimism pans out then we hope to make it a formal, documented part of our officially SKY Developer program and developer user onboarding. However, as I write this in March 2020, we aren’t ready to commit to that yet.
You may be thinking: Sounds good, what is the catch?
No catch, really, but this is an experiment and so we are establishing some criteria for participants and a few ground rules.
1. This is an experiment - don't bank your business or partnership on this. We may decide to end this experiment on short notice. We may end it for an individual developer or for all developers, depending on what we learn. Today's invitation should not be interpreted as an infinite grant of access to this environment.
2. We are starting with RENXT. We must start somewhere, and we chose RENXT. If this works well, we will look to expand to other products at a later date.
3. Your user account in this environment has read-only access to a subset of data. While we think you can do a lot of compelling things just with read access, including making compelling Add-ins, we recognize there may be limits. However, restricting to read access helps us control the scope and variables in our experiment so we are standing firm on that for this first iteration.
4. To be eligible to participate in this iteration we are requiring that you demonstrate your interest in making Add-ins by making at least one SKY Application with at least 1 Add-in for an RENT extension point. You can do this in the developer portal under My Applications using the steps described in the Register Add-in help documentation here .
If this sounds interesting to you, and you are cool with the rules and criteria (especially note #4 about demonstrating you can fill out the registration form), then please message me via the community and include the name of one of your applications that has an Add-in (even if it is a placeholder). I will then send you a standard RENXT user invite which you can accept and begin exploring.
I hope you’ll take a chance with us and try it out, and I look forward to hearing from the community at large about what you think about this idea. We want to hear your feedback on this - get in there, play around, build cool stuff, let us know if this unblocks scenarios for you, let us know if you're still stuck because of {thing we should improve}"
App Marketplace preview screenshot featuring Apps that have SKY Add-ins
(This Blog announcement is an update of an earlier discussion posted in the General category)
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03/20/2020 12:22pm EDT
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would you add me to the sky developer cohort instance - our site is still in test and want to do some testing in advance.