Question about customer wanting to use SKY API with a hosted CRM environment

Dylan Hochreiter

Hi there,

A customer of ours has inquired about us adding an integration with Blackbaud CRM for them.

We currently have integrations with both BBMS and RENXT already.

I have evaluated the APIs and it does look like we can satisfy their requirements with those but one thing came up that I wanted to post about.

The customer uses a hosted CRM environment, as in it's hosted by them and not by Blackbaud. I didn't think this would work with the SKY API, but they had come back to us indicating that “customers with third-party hosting can now use the SKY API after SP35”.

Would this be different than the SKY API that is used when connecting to Blackbaud hosted CRM instances? If not, is there anything else I need to be aware of here?

We would be building the integration and testing it using the Cohort environment, so I want to make sure that an integration built and tested that way would work for the clients situation as well.

Any help with this is much appreciated.

Thank you,

Dylan Hochreiter

Brian Riesen

@Dylan Hochreiter
Hi Dylan - Just checking in to see if you still needed assistance with your question or if were you able to sort it out?

Dylan Hochreiter

@Brian Riesen

Hi Brian, I still need some assistance with the above questions. Thank you!

Brian Riesen

@Dylan Hochreiter
According to the CRM 4.0 Service Pack 35 Release Notes one of the Issues addressed in Service Pack 35 shows

“New Feature: With Service Pack 35, SKY API will now be accessible to on premise customers. In order to connect to SKY API, on premise customers will need to reach out to support to complete a one-time connection process. Note that customers hosted by Blackbaud do not need to take any further action; access to SKY API is automatically enabled with Service Pack 35. For more information, refer to our New Features Guide.”

I suggest reaching out to support regarding the referenced "one-time connection process" and the CRM 4.0 New Features Guide for more details.

I hope this helps!

Dylan Hochreiter

@Brian Riesen

Hi Brian, thank you for the helpful info!

Based on our communications with the customer, I believe that they have already reached out to support to get this setup on their end.

Would this just be using the regular SKY API for Blackbaud CRM or is there a difference in the APIs used by Blackbaud hosted CRM environments vs. on premises hosted environments?

We want to make sure that if we build a Blackbaud CRM integration in our 3rd party application that it can work with the on premise hosted CRM setup of the customer.

Brian Riesen

@Dylan Hochreiter
I had to reach out to some experts for a definitive answer on this one, and here's what they shared.

“The short answer is, it is the same SKY API for both BB hosted and self hosted. The challenge with self hosted comes down to one of firewall access and it is a case by case basis with each customer as to whether their IT staff will enable that access. We recommend they ensure that SKY API connectivity to BBCRM is working for the customer first before building out a solution, and from the sound of it they are already working through support to do just that.”

So it is the same API regardless of where BB CRM is hosted, but as with many things self-hosted, the network security configurations can very which could cause potential issue.

Hope that helps!