RE/MS Office Changes

Many of you who use Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge and are hosted by Blackbaud have probably already heard this, but as it could potentially be a big change to your workflows I felt it was worth mentioning here.

After February 28, 2022 Blackbaud will no longer support Microsoft Office integrations within Raiser's Edge for hosted customers. This means there will be changes to your workflows that involve Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Paint, and Windows Notepad. According to Blackbaud this is to "protect your organization's information" as best they can.

You can check out Blackbaud's official announcement here.

Please note the following:

1. If you are NOT hosted by Blackbaud, these changes will not impact you.
2. If you ARE hosted by Blackbaud but are NOT subscribed to an NXT package, YOU WILL BE impacted by these changes.
3. If you ARE hosted by Blackbaud and ARE an NXT customer who still uses database view for some functions, YOU WILL BE impacted by these changes.

In my opinion the biggest takeaways for Blackbaud customer in scenario 2 are:

• You will be going old school. One example of this is the way you will produce donor acknowledgement letters. In a nut shell, you will export the data for your letters using the appropriate RE Mail file and then perform the mail merge using Word and Excel.
• For more information on how these change will impact organizations in scenario 2 check out this resource for updated Word workflows.
• For more information on how your use of Excel will be impacted check this out.

Blackbaud customers who fall into scenario 3 have options:

• You can choose to go old school too and follow the same procedures documented in this resource for Word workflows.
• You could opt to use an app (available in the Blackbaud Marketplace) like Microsoft Power Platform/Power Automate to generate donor acknowledgement letters as well as update other Word workflows. Check out this resource for more information.
• There are other third-party vendors who are also doing some good work around automating processes in RE NXT web view. DonorTek and Red Arc are two companies you may want to checkout. This is not meant as an endorsement of these two companies. These links provided for informational purposes only.
• For more information on how your use of Excel will be impacted check this out.

I'll have more on this in the coming weeks in the lead up to the change taking effect on February 28, 2022.

Stay tuned!