Independent School Educators' List (ISED-L): Re: Blackbaud Version 8

Monday, October 25, 2010

Re: Blackbaud Version 8

I'll have to say that being dependent upon the Internet for access to
FE, EE and RE, is probably going to cause us to move to another system.=20
We are in a rural area and I just can't see having all our data in the
cloud. We are down too much to risk that and we only have one way to
get to the net, there are not options available in our location.

I hate being forced to move by vendors!

Sister Elizabeth
Powhatan School

>>> Jonathan Mergy <jmergy@lwhs.org> 10/25/2010 11:33 AM >>>
Sure - in an ASP-type environment, I can see BB doing some SSL vpn type
deal
to allow SQL queries for those that want it, have them hit read-only
views
of the database and charging extra or doing some extension of basic
and
advanced lists functionality so you can do what most users will need
anyway.
Makes sense now why BB was so inquisitive about moving customers to the
ASP
model over the last couple of years (at least in my interactions with
them.)

Performance is by far the largest concern for me and also putting the
internet connection in the critical path to data. I=C2=B9m pretty new to =
RE
and
FE (only a couple of years now and minimal interaction after updates
and
moves to decent server environment) but it doesn=C2=B9t seem like a very
efficient client/server system as it sits on gig ethernet, so one would
hope
the re-engineering of it for ASP would be an improvement. In regards
to
having your internet connection be a critical point of failure, it
seems
most schools in general don=C2=B9t see this as an issue as they move
everything
over to Google, etc. to get it off their internal support plate. I am
guessing many schools will welcome this as another way to remove local
servers, support, backup, etc. from their own internal responsibility
so the
BB move probably makes sense. Totally eliminating the local install
option
though is what I would object to.

Jonathan
................................
Jonathan Mergy <jmergy@lwhs.org>
Director Of Technology
Lick-Wilmerding High School
755 Ocean Ave, SF CA 94112
P:415.585.1725 x365
http://www.lwhs.org=20

From: Thomas Phelan <tphelan@peddie.org>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:16:45 -0400
To: ISED-L <ISED-L@listserv.syr.edu>
Cc: Jonathan Mergy <jmergy@lwhs.org>
Subject: Re: Blackbaud Version 8

The main difficulty will be for any customizations or tools that
require
direct access to the SQL data. However, my hope is that direct access
won't
be necessary. In place of direct access to the SQL data Blackbaud will
provide a web service layer to allow access to data. So, for example,
if you
application needs to pull information about a student, instead of
running a
complex SQL query to grab the data you need, your application will ask
the
web service to provide you with the object you need (e.g. a student
object).
This approach means your app is less likely to require modification
with new
versions of Blackbaud, and more importantly, it allows you to take
advantage
of Blackbaud's business logic so your custom apps will be able to
safely
write back data to the db something which would be very dangerous to
do
without BB's business logic.

Two downsides I see to this approach are potential performance issues
and
lack of access to a test platform. Some of my apps would almost
certainly be
very slow if I had to pull data from a web service. What I'll probably
do
for these is build local tables of the required info (e.g. grades,
grade
reports) on a schedule after hours by making calls to the web service.
By
far my biggest concern regarding Blackbaud's move to SaaS is the lack
of
access to a test server with our data. We regularly load our data on a
test
server of BB to do everything from test new ways of doing things and
major
changes, to training new users, to recovering data from a mistake
(e.g.
faculty member deletes major section of his/her gradebook) when rolling
back
the whole database is not an option. I have voiced this as a concern
and am
waiting for a response.