Road to CA

One big feature we'll gain in the conversion to CA is Rules. Rules let you use criteria to determine whether or not a certain action will apply. For instance, you can set a rule to determine whether a pledge should post to the GL. During our Constituent and Contribution training we've seen a number of places where rules can apply. I know we'll see even more in our Communications Management training next month.

Just last week Todd and I experimented with CA rules for the first time. We developed, and then refined, a rule that would post a pledge to the GL if it wasn't a current year Annual Fund pledge. The rule would cause a Y or N to default into the "Post to GL" box on the new pledge screen, but would not overwrite a manually entered value in that box. Perfect!

This afternoon Todd, Matt and I start our Institutional Advancement Reporting Techniques training. Todd has been anxiously awaiting this class, as file structure in CA is very different from what she's been used to in Benefactor.

Once we complete the class we'll have to start getting serious about preparing the reports that will be needed for CA.

This is our second virtual classroom training - no need to drive to Virginia, but also no opportunity to shop at Whole Foods!

This weekend we are officially closing the door on Conversion Test #1!

We ran the last of our conversions 17 days ago, and since then have been running post-conversion processes and evaluating the data that converted over. In doing so we have found some areas that need more work - like duplicate addresses - and some areas where we need to tweak our conversion settings - like recognition history. We've also found a few possible bugs and have passed that information along to Datatel. (I really do find more than my share of software bugs - or maybe they find me!)

In the past week we've refreshed the data in bentest and prepared bentest for the second conversion - running pre-processes, setting up L1 groups, etc.

This weekend we are going to wipe the slate clean and create a fresh clone of production for our second conversion environment. We've been doing cleanup in production and benlive as we've worked through the first conversion, and so expect to find many fewer errors this time around.

For those of you who are curious, our first conversion test took 3 days, 20 hours, 22 minutes and 57 seconds to run all of the conversion validations, test updates, and updates. We expect the second conversion to go more quickly, because we don't expect to be running the validation stage multiple times as we did first time around. Our goal is to fly through conversion #2 and then keep this environment around for training and testing. Wish us luck!