Upcoming release information on Raiser's Edge 7.95 - Frequently Asked Questions!
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Hello Raiser's Edge Community!
We're excited to announce Raiser's Edge 7.95 is coming soon! I know many of you have lots of great questions about the release and want information to prepare, so before we have officially released all the full user documentation, I wanted to provide the top asked questions we've heard from customers so far along with some answers:
What's in Raiser's Edge 7.95?
Raiser's Edge 7.95 contains all the major enhancements from RE 7.94, but includes several addition features requested from clients and also prevents organizations from needing to do cleanup or thorough preparation prior to the upgrade. The main features are below, and note specific features have already been included in Raiser's Edge 7.94.
And more...!
What do I need to do to prepare?
For RE 7.94 customers, no preparation or adjustment of your data is necessary; these features will be applied in a way that does not impact your data or require changes or advance work.
For customers on version 7.93 and lower, although Blackbaud recommends you routinely ensure your data is up to date and clean, this is not a barrier to updating to the latest version. You may upgrade directly to Raiser's Edge 7.95 and it includes all the previous features and bug fixes. A release checklist will be provided on the release page on the community this week, but here is what you need to know:
​
We recently began an Early Adopter Program with a small group of on premise customers last week, and we will continue to ensure no major issues are identified before we make the release generally available for download. We will notify our customers by email when the release is made available on our website. The availability depends on when we have had enough time to validate the release with customer feedback, but we are targeting for the release to be made available before the end of November.
For clients hosted with Blackbaud, we will begin releasing this gradually in phases starting at the end of October through the end of November. No preparation of your data or changes are needed to receive the update as this will not impact your organization's existing phone or email structure as these changes were delivered with version 7.94. We will provide an email update when your organization is scheduled to receive the enhancements.
Where can I get more information?
Stay up to date on the most recent information on our release page for Raiser's Edge on the community, as we will be posting a schedule of webinars, new features guide, and a release checklist on the community page this week. We will also be providing an update of this information by email when the webinars are officially available!
Raiser's Edge 7.95 contains all the major enhancements from RE 7.94, but includes several addition features requested from clients and also prevents organizations from needing to do cleanup or thorough preparation prior to the upgrade. The main features are below, and note specific features have already been included in Raiser's Edge 7.94.
- Separation of phones and emails from addresses, and all contact information is moved to the Bio 1 tab and placed under new tabs - already included in version 7.94 (​Don't worry, the Bio 1/Org 1 tabs will still have the same active phones and emails in 7.95 as they did before you upgraded!)
- Adding of red check marks to identify which tabs have data
- Providing the ability to add Comments and view the Date Last Changed for contact information
- Automatic refresh setting added to dashboards - already included in version 7.94
And more...!
- A business rule to manage whether phones or emails of the same type can be added in the database (ex. allowing the value of "Email" to be added twice on a record, one as active and one as inactive)
- A new user option to default a tab being selected when opening a record (telephone number, email address, other etc.)
- Historical phones/emails from alternate addresses with the send mail box marked and reciprocal relationships will be marked as inactive automatically. Information about this data will be pre-populated in the "Comments" fields. This information will be available in query, export, and import if any historical adjustment of these records is desired
- Note: This feature only applies when upgrading to 7.95 from version 7.93 or lower. For clients who are already on 7.94, the Contact Information plug-in was created to assist with inactivating historical data from relationships
- Feature coming soon for Blackbaud Merchant Services clients (shortly after 7.95 release): Auto-reconciliation will be released in phases shortly after 7.95 becomes available. This will allow your organization to save time by reconciling your credit card transactions directly within Raiser's Edge. For a preview of this functionality, take a look at this video here
What do I need to do to prepare?
For RE 7.94 customers, no preparation or adjustment of your data is necessary; these features will be applied in a way that does not impact your data or require changes or advance work.
For customers on version 7.93 and lower, although Blackbaud recommends you routinely ensure your data is up to date and clean, this is not a barrier to updating to the latest version. You may upgrade directly to Raiser's Edge 7.95 and it includes all the previous features and bug fixes. A release checklist will be provided on the release page on the community this week, but here is what you need to know:
​
- No data needs to be adjusted or updated prior to moving to Raiser's Edge 7.95, as these changes can be done before or after the update
- Pivot reports will need to be recreated if upgrading to Raiser's Edge 7.95 from version 7.93 or lower. We strongly recommend taking snapshots of these pivot reports before updating to the latest version as these will not be preserved after upgrading
- For customers integrated with Education Edge, please review the following information for some additional information related to upgrading on our Knowledgebase
- Existing queries and exports will not need to be rebuilt and will still be fully supported
- ​Note: You may need to add a filter to queries and/or exports if you wish to filter out Inactive Phone to achieve the same results if your data has historical contact information on addresses. This may be done by adding the Phone Inactive filter to your query or export
We recently began an Early Adopter Program with a small group of on premise customers last week, and we will continue to ensure no major issues are identified before we make the release generally available for download. We will notify our customers by email when the release is made available on our website. The availability depends on when we have had enough time to validate the release with customer feedback, but we are targeting for the release to be made available before the end of November.
For clients hosted with Blackbaud, we will begin releasing this gradually in phases starting at the end of October through the end of November. No preparation of your data or changes are needed to receive the update as this will not impact your organization's existing phone or email structure as these changes were delivered with version 7.94. We will provide an email update when your organization is scheduled to receive the enhancements.
Where can I get more information?
Stay up to date on the most recent information on our release page for Raiser's Edge on the community, as we will be posting a schedule of webinars, new features guide, and a release checklist on the community page this week. We will also be providing an update of this information by email when the webinars are officially available!
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Raiser's Edge® Blog
10/22/2015 12:35pm EDT
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