Microsoft changes - historical information

Conne Bruce

We save all individual mail correspondence within actions in RE - all acknowledgement letters, introductory letters, mailed proposals, etc. With the change that was posted to the Q&A Friday, February 4th about the changes with MSFT, we will not even be able to view these documents. Blackbaud (and other consultants) have told us we need to download these documents one by one. Is anyone else working on retaining their historical records and moving them to sources outside of RE?

Faith Murray

@Conne Bruce , you do not necessarily need to do this manually if all you care about is content rather than format. We had over 1,000 letters saved as Action attachments. I found that we could export the Action content (create an Action query of “Attachments not blank”, and then an Action export outputting Attachments and Action Import ID). I then Imported the content into an action Note for each relevant record. It took me about 2 hours to do, and that mostly because I was learning as I went.

While it loses the format (it imports as all one text block rather than having nice spaces and indents), the important part for us was that the content was preserved, so we could remember what was communicated. I understand this may not work if you have heavily structured forms or graphics in Word, but for text-only letters it was way better than trying to manually download almost 1,000 documents from Actions, and then re-uploading them, in two weeks.

Conne Bruce

@Faith Murray this was an answer prayers - an angelic gift. ?

This worked! We had over 20 years of letters saved to actions - over 16k of them! We were able to export and re-import based on your directions. Thank you! Thank you! You saved us hours/days/weeks of downloading. We are grateful!

Faith Murray

So glad!! That's no small number of records. Glad it saved you some sweat!

Karen Diener

@Faith Murray is this new in Query? I haven't worked with a single organization who has been doing this, so have never needed to be concerned. I do see it in Actions but not in any other query types (Constituent or Gift) where there also could be embedded Word documents.

Do you have any idea if functionality will be added to extract that data as well, either via query or sometime in the future? Thanks!

Karen

Faith Murray

I honestly don't know if it's a new feature or not, since I never had to export Action attachments before. ? As far as outputting other types of embedded Word docs, could you share what other types of embedded docs you mean?

As far as I am aware, database view does not have the capability for Constituent or Gift attachments - those only exist in webview. Since these kind do not carry over into database view, they are therefore not queriable, not searchable, not exportable, and not able to be backed up or restored in a data backup. Attachments in webview are also not affected by the upcoming changes in Microsoft integration - they will continue to be able to be opened in webview through your browser.

Karen Diener

Good point about never needing to export attachments before!

Like I said, I don't have any experience with this since I've never worked for or with an organization that saved documents in this way. I know you can generate letters from a constituent record and a gift record, but I see now that they are both saved as actions and not embedded on the constituent or gift record.

I'm glad this action export has been added. And again, I will say that it should have been ready to go when this whole change was announced but oh well!

Karen

Rachel Kulsdom

This was very helpful, thank you. I did this for over 9000 attachments. However, I do have over 1000 it didn't work for - the exported field looks blank, but some of these do have attachments with content. Did you come across this? Some of them seem to have linked gifts, I wonder if that could have had an affect. Also - there are Word symbols sometimes on gifts, like an attachment. I'm not sure if those always exist on actions as well, or if the gifts have Word doc attachments themselves? When I looked at query and export I couldn't find fields like for action attachments. Thanks

Tom Reaney

I just came to add immense thanks to Faith for this info - I felt truly lost and could not for the life of me think of a way to tackle this issue, and it has just worked for me! All of our Donation Thank You letters with vital Gift Aid text are now backed up so we won't lose access to them - thank you so much!

Annette Rayas

@Faith Murray, Your Action query suggestion was very helpful. Thank you. We're in the process of migrating from RE7 to NXT. By chance do you know how to extract word doc attachments from Media? I ran a Media query & we have over 2,000 attachments, but the “type” of files attached are not available as a query field nor is the content of the attached files.