Now we're losing letters?!

Yes, that is my understanding. If you have Office 365, though, you can create an NXT workaround using Power Automate. Haven't tried it yet but am planning to set this up at our org:

They've told me export is not going away, only mailmerge to word

I have not had a chance to try an actual foreign address. The first time I tried the address block, by inserting what you said before, it looked good, it separated the lines of address properly. This is a crazy time of year, and still working on other stuff right now.

If we are loosing all real & practical functionality of the Mail Module, 3rd party vendors should be paid for by BB, not us. We have asked our sales rep this and they are getting us the “numbers” of what each option would cost and I will share that here. They said there is no “plan” for anything to replace the Mail Module nor provide this functionality in NXT. I was frankly shocked. I brought up that our previous CRM LGL (which largely was awful) had a fully integrated letters module that worked remarkably well. Why couldn't BB acquire this technology, or buy one of these third part vendors?

I don't know how on earth we will budget for this, but BB must consider offsetting the third party vendor cost, or acquiring one of these apps for its customers as they are not seemingly developing anything. It's only fair since the are cutting off our legs to at least give us crutches to hobble forward on…!

You can also look at Bill Connors' whitepaper http://billconnors.com/msinhosting/?fbclid=IwAR0Vd4OZoGNzm1ee8uMaqgkJcP1gddwmMc_5fk8S5_EpxYcaVY0QME9YIvE or the Blackbaud resource page https://www.blackbaud.com/hosting-integration-update-resources?utm_source=community.blackbaud.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=website

I literally timed a recent export and it took 3x longer with the manual conditional mail merge (which I am very adept at, and did before BB). We have 12 separate letters, including Memberships. This is not a good "solution" for us, it is a huge problem.

For anyone that hasn't seen it yet, the tool to mass export all of your letters from RE is ready:

Beverly Porzelt:

Wow, when did this get done? Better late than never I guess

I didn't even get a notification from BB, an RE consultant that I'm subscribed to their newsletters sent out the info…thanks BB….

It worked really well, I have all of our letters out of RE now and a ton less anxiety

Do we know if they will develop one for the parameter files too?

Formatting? Thanks to Suzie's recent post, I was able to export all 24 ack letters in from RE. I created the conditional merge document in Word and successfully completed the merge outside of RE. BUT…..the formatting is totally “wonky”. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Suzie MacMillan: Thank you! I will try this tomorrow. I appreciate your help! Thank you.

Peggy Gibbs:

Formatting? Thanks to Suzie's recent post, I was able to export all 24 ack letters in from RE. I created the conditional merge document in Word and successfully completed the merge outside of RE. BUT…..the formatting is totally “wonky”. Does anyone know how to fix this?

The word docs out of RE are usually an older version of word, one, I made sure autosave was off, and then when I saved one of the exported word docs, I either saved it as the same older version of word or if I saved it as a newer version I made sure to select “maintain compatibility with previous versions of word” and I found that kept the formatting the same (when I saved as a newer version of word without doing that it totally wrecked my formatting)

Be aware everyone. BB has started making changes already. Patch 27 changed membership cards, renewals, and receipts, that I am aware of. Reference https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/198472. You need to perform the mass export if you haven't already to use these mail functions. I was told "From now on, to process mail merges, you'll need to use the "Word Merge Document Exporter" https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/articles/Article/198463 (in the article you'll find a video that will guide you on how to use this solution."

Rachel, you deserve a Community Award of some kind! Thank you!

Thanks so much Rachel

Michael Catrino:

Hi Rachel,

Thank you so much for creating these instructions! I just have one question (so far). I clicked on “Export” in Raiser's Edge and I didn't see “Multiconditional Merge Export” as an option. Could you let me know what I could be missing? Thanks.

Michael

Hi Michael - if you haven't found the answer to your question yet, hope I can be of help.

I'm not exactly certain if you are looking to work with your letter data, or with letters themselves that have already been built in RE that need to be moved out.

If just data, the Export option for this is the in the lower right corner of the first tab of a mail object, print screen here:

If you are looking to export your actual letters in one fell swoop, that tool is at the bottom of your tools list as shown here: (See bottom option - Word Merge Document Exporter)

If you have not yet done so, be sure to reference the documentation you access using the “click here” link in the notification bar at the top of your Citrix Access screen. Hope it goes well for you!