Road to CA

Todd, Matt and I recently completed the Communications Management for CA training in Fairfax, VA. This class was very informative. We had lots of hands-on experience using Communications Management for things like writing receipts, acknowledgements, and follow-up letters. Most of the training was focused on outgoing mail.

We only touched on how Communications Management can be used to handle incoming mail and phone calls. Having taken Fundamentals of Communication Management online a few months ago I know that there's a lot more Communications Management can do, with not a lot of overlap between the two courses. I think it would be a good idea for Matt or Todd to take the Fundamentals course at some time to get a better idea of how they can fully use Communications Management in CA.

Okay, so I know I never told you we had started the second conversion. It's been a busy month.

But here we are, with the second conversion nearly complete! It started out more slowly than we had hoped, with a whole lot of address ambiguities at L1 - far more than we got in the first conversion, despite the huge number of duplicate addresses we had removed from Colleague prior to the clone of the conversion environment.

Once we got a handle on the address problems the rest went fairly smoothly. The exception is N2 - Employment - and we are waiting to hear from Rachna about why we have over 6000 start/end date errors when we didn't get these in the first conversion.

After much discussion, a final date for conversion has been set. We will begin at 5 pm Thursday August 6th and be up and running by 8 am Tuesday August 11th.

Benefactor will go down at noon Thursday August 6th, so that we can run the pre-processes that need to be run before starting the conversions.

The following weekend will be a backup weekend, though we don't expect we'll need to use it.

With the second conversion completed, it's a good time to grab a breath and consider our next steps. Here are some of the things on our short-term to-do list.

• Fix errors found in the second conversion. We don't have too much to do here. Most conversions had a small number of errors and we were able to fix them as we went along. Exceptions are N4 (relations) and L1 (address ambiguities). These will take a little more time to fix, but we'd like them done before Conversion 3.
• Work on Report Writing. Todd and I started this towards the end of the first conversion, but then had to put this aside when we wiped out the first conversion environment, leaving us no data for testing our reports. Now that we have data in CA again, we are back at work on this. Our goal is to have at least a few tricky reports and computed columns identified before our pre-DUG Advanced Computed Columns workshop.
• Plan for Conversions 3 and 4. That's right, we expect 4 conversions. The third will start as soon as we have the errors identified in conversion 2 fixed, and the fourth will be about a month before our live date. The third will be to verify that we have fixed all the errors, and the fourth will be to simulate the live conversion - only during the week instead of on a weekend!

We are in the process of identifying and creating the top 10 drop-dead reports needed when we go live. So far, these are: CashRpts, YTD Progress, 5YR Cashflow, Trustee CYR Giving, Performance Rpt, Annual Fund Comparison, Monthly Moves Rpt, Monthly Asks Rpt (that's only 8, I know, but we are still reviewing!). We also will need to build our solicitation paragraphs for the Annual Fund which will begin their mailings and phonathons in September. Then there is the On-line Community and Ruffalo-Cody downloads that need to be in production right away! Phew...we'll get it done.

One success story to report here. We created the Monthly Cash Report in conversion and it matches up beautifully with the same report from Benefactor Test! Hurrah! Now turning attention to the YTD reports which are a little more complex.

Also identified another BUG but have a workaround for it from Datatel. Apparently the subroutine for XLAT.VALCODES does not work properly in the unidata environment! But we got it figured out with Hemma's help, and moved on.