Road to CA

You've been hearing about this for a while. Benefactor is going away and the data from it will be migrated to Colleague Advancement. We officially start the migration process in two weeks, as part of Datatel's "Cohort F".

But don't think that means we haven't started working towards our end goal! Todd Fox from Development has been preparing for the migration for quite some time now - maybe two years- cleaning up Benefactor data and running pre-conversion programs. Mary Jane Lombardi did a lot of the early work, writing paragraphs and virtual fields to help with the conversion programs which, when Todd and Mary Jane started this, weren't as robust as they are now. And I'm trying to learn as much about Benefactor and Colleague as I can, to be ready for the tasks we're about to undertake.

Modeled after the R18 blog that Pete Gifford kept during the conversion from R17 to R18, I plan to use this blog as a diary of our journey from Benefactor to Colleague Advancement. It's safe to say that I have little idea of what lies ahead in the coming year, but I do know one thing. We CAN get there from here!

For those of you with EXTREMELY busy schedules, I've summed up the past few months in picture form. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words...

It's taken us a little while to work out how best to make use of the LBPM process, which matches PERSON records on Benefactor with the same PERSON record on Colleague, if it exists. At this point it appears we have things under control and we are now confident we'll get through the rest of this process in time for conversion. Three recent changes have led us to embrace LBPM as our friend:

• A long standing performance issue has been resolved, which will greatly increase our productivity.
• We're following the lead of other schools and writing our own reports from the LBPM output. These new reports include much more detail about the potential matches found, making it easier to determine at a glance if it is indeed a match.
• We've added middle name comparisons to our duplicate criteria to reduce the number of possible matches reported. You'd be surprised how many {insert first name here} Smith's there are on Colleague!

We continue to make progress towards our conversion. In the past week we have:

• Completed the first of our Colleague Advancement training classes at Datatel - Constituent Management


• Completed the FUNDS pre-process


• Set up the Conversion environment (thanks, Pete!)


• Refreshed the data in the Benefactor test environment


• Run thousands more records through the LBPM person matching process

With this, our pre-processes are nearing completion and we are about ready to move on to step G in the Alphabet Soup list - creating translation tables for code files and code tables. I'm told to expect this to take a while.

We've been so busy with the conversion that we forgot to update the blog for the past two weeks! Here's what we've been up to:

• Constituent Management Collaboration Workshop. On November 3rd we had a 3 hour teleconference workshop with Carole from Datatel, going over all the PID screens in Colleague that had implications for the conversion, as well as lots and lots of valcode tables. For a topic that had the potential to be deadly, it was a surprisingly interesting and fast moving session.


• Conversion Consulting. Tuesday, November 4th we had our first of many conversion consulting calls with Rachna from Datatel. Rachna was very helpful in answering our questions, and she seemed pleased with our progress. We're looking forward to working with her through the process.


• Translation Tables! One hundred and twenty-two of them, to be exact. We're doing the groundwork for mapping Benefactor's code files and valcode tables into Colleague. At Datatel's recommendation we're doing this work in production so we won't need to re-do it with each test conversion.


• LBPMing. Of course. But Todd's making remarkable progress here and sees the light at the end of the tunnel.


• Security. We're starting to look at what security needs to be set up in CA. This is another case of wanting to do something just once, so we'll get this set up now in production and it will be ready in the conversion environment when we need people to go in there and start testing.