It finally happened. After five years of working in Blackbaud schools, I have taken the plunge. It took a web application to do it, of course. Over the last few weeks, I have migrated the admission inquiry form from my previous school to this one, except this time I set up all the data import routines. The script collects basic applicant details and allows them to schedule a parent tour and school visit. It produces a set of import files that you may then use to get the web data into Education Edge. It's pretty slick once we work out all the intricacies of our process and import exceptions.

Many of the error messages in Education Edge are pretty nondescript, but I am finally beginning to get familiar with the conventions. I realized today that "Action for Import ID" meant that I should find the Import ID for the applicant, an automatically generated string of numbers and dashes that ensures that the tour/visit action ends up in the correct applicant record. This was easy to pick up with "select import id from ea7records where userdefinedid = [applicant id]." "Wrong field type" means that whatever Education Edge shows in the user input screen for a field does not necessarily match the format it uses during an import! Some guesswork may be required. For example, "Faculty/Staff Member" just becomes "Faculty/Staff" for the purposes of import. I am still searching for the correct format of the "send reminder to" field. In the UI, it's simply the logon username for that individual. However, that fails the import as "invalid."

I didn't think I would ever say this, but some aspects of Blackbaud are beginning to look extremely powerful, and dare I say ... elegant? ... at least until it breaks the next time!

We have just launched a bookstore point of sale system that I wrote as a web script. Why not use a commercial point of sale product? We want our students to be able to self-checkout at a computer workstation without requiring the presence of a staff member. The main student-facing page is a simple screen that allows one to log in using web site credentials and then buy one or more books using a barcode scanner. Easy, right?



I didn't appreciate until neck-deep in the project that this was really more of an accounting project than a sales front-end! The business office can download sales from the script's admin interface. The download file includes the student's Education Edge ID, the EE code for the book purchased, the price, and the date of the sale. It includes a few dates -- date of sale, post date, and due date, which are part of the billing process. In order to know the retail price, the script needs to keep track of the purchase price, which changes during the year as new editions are ordered and retail prices change. In order to know the total value of inventory for accounting purposes, the script needs to keep track of inventory and book cost -- the price the school paid for the book. My goodness! It took a while to get all of these details sorted out and debugged. We have 270 students each buying a handful of books. After a couple of years of selling books, we will surely come out ahead in terms of time spent.