We got an email at the end of August from Blackbaud telling us that we have until October 31st this year to upgrade to Blackbaud Netcommunity 6.10 (at least), or we will no longer be able to take payment via our website.
The first issue with this is the ridiculously small amount of notice we've been given - 2 months is not a generous amount of time, for reasons I'll explain in a second. Blackbaud really need to sort out their communication with customers. No call from our account manager, no heads-up email - just a one-off mailshot at the end of August from some bloke I've never heard of. Not acceptable.
I understand the reasons behind the upgrade - there are some new credit card regulations (PCI DSS) that Blackbaud want to stay on the right side of, and only BBNC 6.10 and above handle transactions in a way that is compliant. It's just the way Blackbaud have gone about it that has narked me off, and it's just another annoyance that makes me wonder whether we'd be better off using open-source tools to build our website. One of the main benefits of BBNC is the supposed integration with Raiser's Edge - whilst it is handy, it still requires an element of human intervention to process transactions, and I'm not convinced whether the convenience of partial integration outweighs all the negatives that BBNC brings along.
Whilst I've grown to really like using ASP.NET, having never used it before, the nature of BBNC means that it really is quite a pain in the backside to make the kind of changes to how it works that wouldn't be a problem with an open source CMS like (for example) Joomla. With Joomla, any bugs or annoyances get solved by the community, and quickly - Blackbaud have shown themselves to not be particularly speedy when it comes to implementing even the most basic of features that have been requested by the community.
It would be possible to import transactions from Joomla in a partially-automated fashion, in much the same way BBNC works - without the extensive costs of BBNC and the hassle of development.
BBNC has lots of great features, but it's lacking in so many of the most simple areas that when things like this happen I start to wonder whether it's worth the hassle for a minimal amount of extra convenience on the database side.
UpgradeAt the moment however, I can't think too much about the above, as the impending deadline
means that I just have to get on with upgrading Netcommunity and Raiser's Edge so that we can continue to take online payments. We're currently running BBNC 5.6 and RE 7.85 - we need to be running at least BBNC 6.10 and RE 7.91.
This means we need to upgrade our Netcommunity SQL Server from 2005 to 2008 (which may possibly break some of the other web applications we have running on that server), upgrade Netcommunity, and then upgrade Raiser's Edge and roll it out to the workstations.
The scary bit for me is upgrading Netcommunity - a lot of our custom parts were created before I started here, and many of them use parts of the API that they shouldn't. My concern is that upgrading may break some (or all) of these parts, and I'll have to figure out how to fix them.
For example, our entire site navigation is generated using a custom part that hooks in to parts of BBNC that it shouldn't - the Menu part in Netcommunity was found to be unfit for purpose at the time, so being sneaky was the only viable choice. If the custom menu breaks, I'll either have to fix it or convert the site navigation over to Menu 2.0. A lot of hassle with not a lot of time.
Anyone else in this position?
