We've had our Design call and our technical pre-requisite call. Really interesting and thorough. Note to those who plan to move forward - it's really helpful if you have a good understanding of your current process and some objectives. Our technical call went well. Basically, we had a few decisions to make. We are going to link with Sharepoint. We currently have a Sharepoint Server site we use as our Intranet. By linking Papersave with Sharepoint, we will be able to have more robust search capabilites and users who don't have RE access will still be able to see the scanned backup documentation.
Papersave has two parts: the database part will reside on our current SQL Server. Here we house all our databases related to Blackbaud. The other part - the application - will reside on our Sharepoint server that has IIS installed. You need IIS for the Papersave application. The people on this call should include anyone who handles your server environment and application implementation.
Our design call also went well. There was a bigger crowd in attendance. Here you are going to walk through your process. In our case, we started with when the mail comes in the door right through to the acknowledgements and tributes. I would suggest your group should include someone who has a thorough understanding of the process of gift entry. You should also have your RE admin present and, if you use Sphere FAF, the download processing person should be in attendance. Include the exec staff who looks at the document and your finance person.
During the design call, you will work with your consultant to document all of your processes and discuss any issues. This design call is in preparation for the configuration of your application. One of the things we had to work through was how we would handle our Sphere FAF gifts that come in the mail. Currently, all gifts for our walks must be entered into Sphere FAF and then downloaded into an RE batch. Other online gifts come down into a batch also. We wanted to be able to match the scanned documents with the manually entered FAF donations. We needed to be able to identify them in the batch. We currently mark any walk donation that is manually entered by us into FAF with an attribute: Processed in Office. This will work to identify those gifts in batch. After we make sure we have all our server/appliation pre-requisites complete, the next step is the application install and configuration. I'll post more on that as it happens.
Other news: Just read that with patch 20 for RE we will have compatibility with Office 2010. We have no big plans to move yet, but software assurance will run out soon so I'll probably update soon. Everyone out there does use Techsoup for your software purchases, I hope. Biggggg savings!
Lastly, but very important - our next user group meeting will be on June 3rd and hosted by Cora Services', Peggy Campellone. I'm excited. Hope any of you near the Philly area can join us.
Spring is in the air - get out and enjoy! Nora
