I have just returned from day one of the Blackbaud’s 2009 Relationship Management Conference. For those of you who were at my presentation then thank you for coming. If you were not there or you did not get a USB drive then you can view the whole presentation on Zeidman Development at this link.
Category Archives: Not Code
Replacing Excel
Most of the Raiser’s Edge users that I speak to complain that Blackbaud only offers CSV and tab delimited files as a way of importing data. They say that this is very limiting, that CSV can be unwieldy to work with outside of The Raiser’s Edge. They are also very pleased to hear that any customisation that I write allows them to import from Excel and also writes reports to Excel too. Excel offers so much functionality to prepare your data. However there are problems working with the Excel object model from within the API Continue reading Replacing Excel
Download The Raiser’s Edge for Free…
Well that is what many visitors to this site and Zeidman.info (especially the downloads area) seem to think. When I look at my stats and see the various visitors to my site almost every day I get somebody who is looking for The Raiser’s Edge and looking to download it for free. What is surprising is that these requests, mainly via Google, come not only from US and UK but from all over the world. I really never knew that there was such interest in The Raiser’s Edge in such far away places as Latvia, Turkey, Australia, Iran, India, Bolivia, Pakistan and Thailand to name just a few. Of some of the more obscure searches that lead people to my sites include:
and my favourite:
And some more common ones…
Despite all this there are very many serious requests for information about The Raiser’s Edge API and it I am genuinely glad to have been of help.
If you do want to some Blackbaud software for free why not try BlackbaudNow or ETapestry?
SSIS Convert
I have been working on a project to bring in a large amount of data into The Raiser’s Edge. Everyone else on the project has been using SSIS to do this and previously I would probably have manipulated the data in Excel, Access or for the most complicated data written a small application to convert the data into the format that I wanted before importing it into RE. Having used SSIS for a day now I am say that I am converted!
Scheduling a plug-in
After dispelling the myth that you do not need to buy the Blackbaud API module for The Raiser’s Edge in order to work with customisations (you can run a plug-in), I usually get asked well what are the disadvantages of using a plug-in? I normally say that one of problems with a plug-in is that somebody has to press the “start” button. I recently found a solution to this. Continue reading Scheduling a plug-in
Integrating Raiser’s Edge with non-Blackbaud Products
A lot of the work that I do involves the integration of third party products with The Raiser’s Edge. It is not always right to develop a custom application to perform this integration. There are many factors including the volume of data transfer, the complexity of data, how quickly the data needs to be integrated and of course what budget is available. This article attempts to outline the options available to Raiser’s Edge managers who need to integrate with non-Blackbaud products.
Continue reading Integrating Raiser’s Edge with non-Blackbaud Products
Screencast of IDLookup for looking up online donations
This screencast of IDLookup shows you how perform a lookup based on data coming in from an online donation page. The data is downloaded from the website without constituent ids. We run IDLookup and find several matches. We are now able to import the data into The Raiser’s Edge with existing constituent information being updated and new constituents being created.
For more information about IDLookup or to download a fully working version (tied to the sample database) visit the IDLookup download page.
Latest IDLookup Release
Zeidman Development are excited to announce the release of IDLookup 2.0.
It has been totally rewritten to give it a new look and feel but that is the least of it. The new version includes:
- Instead of just one set of criteria you can have many. The plug-in will try to match against each criteria set until it finds either a unique match or the match with the fewest multiples. Save your criteria sets for later use.
- Review multiple matches more easily. The multiples are now cross referenced to another worksheet in Excel so you can see the values from Raiser’s Edge and compare them to values in the file
- Match last or organisation name on aliases
- Match on date of birth.
- Address equivalents are now customizable from within IDLookup in a new easier to use interface
- User interface is localized for UK, US and for Canadian English language
And what is more Zeidman Development is keeping its pledge and making this latest upgrade to our existing users absolutely free.
Read more here
Installing a .NET plugin revisited
A while back I wrote a post about how to install a .NET plugin. Since writing that post I now almost always use Windows installer to install my plugins but every so often they do not install I have not been able to work out why. Today though I think I cracked it.
Inconsistent Last Changed Date Behaviour
This is less of a coding issue and more of a Raiser’s Edge in general issue. I had known that when you make a change to an address on a constituent both the address’ and the constituent’s last changed date would be updated. This is understandable as you cannot save the address without saving the constituent. Continue reading Inconsistent Last Changed Date Behaviour