Raiser's Edge Mobile Application Update
We've been using the app for a bit. We're really in the newbie phase, but I still think it is a great offering. Here is the latest update I received by email from Leah Tomaino at Blackbaud:

Hello RE Mobile Charter and Controlled Release Customers!

We wanted to give you two important bits of information:

·         What we’ve changed based on your feedback, and when you’ll see those changes

·         Notification of a short, planned outage this afternoon

Short outage this afternoon.

We are doing some backend work that will require us to pause mobile services on our side.  This should only take a few hours.  Please pass this on to anyone using the RE Mobile app at your organization.

Changes for the official release of Raiser’s Edge Mobile

The far more exciting news is what we’ve heard from you and what we’re doing with that feedback!

·         We heard you wanted us to handle licensing more gracefully and make it easier to log out of RE Mobile app.   We’re taking a big step in that direction by enabling auto log-out from the mobile app when a user signs into RE proper.

·         We heard that you wanted to be able to see giving score queries in lists.  Done!

·         We heard that you needed to be able to see inactive records in the app.  Done!

·         We heard that if you have action fields required in RE that aren’t available in the app, you would prefer to be able to enter actions without those fields instead of not being able to add the actions at all.  Done!

·         We heard that notes entered through RE Mobile weren’t as easy to identify as you’d like them to be.   We are updating note titles to be Mobile specific. 

·         We heard Year-to-date (YTD) giving totals weren’t aligned with your fiscal year.  We are going to change the YTD calculation from a calendar year calculation to a fiscal year calculation.

There are some requests that we heard from you that we are investigating further, but will need some additional time and information to incorporate.  If you gave us feedback in these areas we may be reaching out to you to get further information or talk to you about participating in discovery as we consider if/how we build out this functionality.

·         Ability to view org records

·         Ability to view module information (membership, events, alumni)

·         Ability to manage events

I also want to mention the bugs we are fixing.    These weren’t about the design of the app, but were bumps in the road that some of you encountered along the way.  Thank you for your patience with us as we worked through these issues:

·         Windows Auth users will now log on with their usual network login—no more having to include the domain name/ in the username field.

·         International customers will see their correct currency symbols instead of all currencies showing with $.

·         Actions and notes that were truncating have been fixed.  You will be able to scroll through results that don’t fit on the screen as would be expected.

·         Emails that were missing will now be available.   We corrected the issue by ensuring that all phone types designated as emails in Configuration will show up regardless of what they’re named (email, e-mail, E mail, etc.)

·         All known timeout issues have been resolved

When can you get all these changes?

We will officially release Raiser’s Edge Mobile this Tuesday, September 18^th.    Changes to the app will be pushed through automatically, but there will be an RE patch and a web service update that you will have to load before seeing all the changes, including the license release change.  When everyone receives the release announcement on Tuesday, there will be update instructions.  Patch 5 will be available for on-premise customers at that time and, if all goes as planned, hosted customers will be updated to patch 5 during the Tuesday evening maintenance window.    Any changes to these plans will be included in Tuesday’s announcement.

Thank you so much to each of you who took the time to pick up the phone and call us, fill out a survey, or shoot us an email.    We really appreciated hearing from you, and appreciated knowing how we could improve your experience with RE Mobile.    We hope that your experience in the Charter/Controlled Release program was a positive one.   If you would like to be included in other programs going forward, for any of our products or have any additional feedback please let me know.

Best wishes,

Leah Tomaino

In Market Learning- Product Management More on the Mobile RE app