Sorry to get your hopes up but I am reliably informed that you cannot do this. And the reason? “PCI Compliance”. Continue reading Writing Code to populate the rejection code field in batch
Small improvements that I like about Blackbaud Enterprise CRM
Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (eCRM or BBEC as it seems to be called interchangeably) is enormous. It is a big change to The Raiser’s Edge but then that is not surprising as it is not actually the replacement for The Raiser’s Edge 7. It is an application way beyond RE 7. Nevertheless you cannot help comparing the two as long as there is no RE8 to compare to. As a software developer it is a whole new paradigm. Of course even if you know how to develop software customisations for BBEC you still need to know how the program works from a user perspective. That is why I am not only learning a new development environment but I am learning a whole new program. Some of the concepts are very similar, some are different. As I learn I have come across some quite small changes that, for whatever reason, fill me with a “wow that’s great” feeling. These are not earth shattering improvements but just things that I am sure people will appreciate. So this post is dedicated to the small differences. Continue reading Small improvements that I like about Blackbaud Enterprise CRM
Blackbaud’s 2009 Relationship Management Conference
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.
C# API Try Catch Finally Snippet
I have been doing some work with C# recently and decided that despite what people say C# is as equally verbose as VB.NET. It is true if you look at the number of characters in a VB program compared to the equivalent C# program there will be a greater number but you seem to get a lot more automatic inserts with VB than you do with C#. C# seems to have a lot more punctuation that VB too adding up to a lot more typing than I was used to.
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
Recurring Gift Schedules
One of the harder imports that you may have to do in The Raiser’s Edge is importing recurring gifts with schedules. The regular help file itself suggests itself that it is tricky but then unfortunately does not offer any examples. Writing code to create various schedules is equally as difficult if not harder. This post does apply to pledges with schedules but, here in the UK, recurring gifts are much more common than pledges with schedules so I will concentrate on that but the same principles apply. I have also noticed that there are more and more people developing in C# so this is for them (but is not that hard to translate to VB.NET) Continue reading Recurring Gift Schedules
The Raiser’s Edge API: VB.NET versus C#
I am sure that there are a many people out there who still use VB6 when working with The Raiser’s Edge API but it is more and more common that you need to write .NET code and indeed want to write .NET code. There are several reasons for this but for me it is simply that the Visual Studio 2008 is a thousand time better than the VB6 development environment. I cringe every time I have to go back to a piece of old code or to the VBA environment. What really interests me is the choice of VB.NET or C# for development.
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?
Installing a plug-in more manually than previously
I have covered this a couple of time before (hence the more and more obscure title) in various posts; here and here but I have been preparing IDLookup for install on Blackbaud’s OnDemand hosting service. Among several requirements is the fact that you have to install the plug-ins manually and not through an installer.
Continue reading Installing a plug-in more manually than previously
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!