Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

Nothing is ever easy with Blackbaud Education Management Software. But if you have the right contact with the support department you can usually get the results you are looking for.

Blackbaud's solution is LTI compliant which should make it easy to interconnect with other LTI-compliant solutions, however some of the ones we would like to connect with do not currently have a partnership with Blackbaud. I would like to see them expand their network of connected 3rd party applications so that their customers had more flexibility with who they could partner with for additional solutions or enhancements.

It takes time and isn't super intuitive. You need support on both sides to help you go through the process.

They have good documentation for each product you are attempting to integrate. Fairly easy to work through the steps.

Blackbaud has come a long way in making the data more accessible to others. Most companies that we integrate with have the process down and can help us with the setup. We are working on leveraging integrations more with some of our processes that our resident programmer writes for us. We are making steady progress as we move from legacy API to SKY API, but some of our data will still be pulled using legacy lists. We have learned a lot from other users in the Blackbaud Community, but we are also really glad that Blackbaud support is more helpful than it has been in the past.

NOT DIFFICULT TO DO, BUT SOME INTEGRATIONS REQUIRED GETTING THE ASSISTANCE OF AN ONLINE REP RATHER THAN SEEMING LIKE SOMETHING WE COULD JUST DO ON OUR OWN. IT IS ALSO DIFFICULT TO FIGURE OUT WHICH SYSTEMS INTEGRATE EASILY AND WHICH ONES DON'T. A MASTER LIST OF ALL INTEGRATION OPTIONS, ALONG WITH A RANKING OF HOW POPULAR THEY ARE, WOULD BE HELPFUL.

I can only comment on integration with Enrollment Management and Smart Tuition. This has made our lives so much easier and streamlined our processes.

I have had no issues with the file imports or exports. This has worked well. I feel like they could build some additional queries or reporting that would improve the data analysis that is contained with in the system. This would help more non-technical users be able to pull the information they need quickly and easily.

As mentioned with the initial integration response, the majority of our integrations have been easy. Correct field mapping is integral. We have had some issues with the Ravenna integration but feel those issues are housed on the Ravenna side.

Blackbaud understands the need to have integrated solutions to meet customers where they are. Again, they tend to vet many integration products and do a lot of legwork to help with setup.

Having one place for families to log into to be able to access all of their child's information is priceless! Much easier and seamless than having to remember many different logins and passwords.

Not enough 3rd party apps to integrate with

Blackbaud in general is more complicated to use than we would like it to be.

It was easy to set up the integrations especially since we were using Blackbaud partners. They pretty much handle the set up with little involvement needed from the school

The Blackbaud team does help customers to integrate products. They make the process seamless and are there should you have any questions. It would be nice if the process was easier but it is my understanding that if something is plugged in the wrong way you would need Blackbaud support to help anyways. Might as well go through the process together

Support is good and usually works well

The integration itself is pretty straightforward. I just watch the information with the flow in both directions. Up and down.

Being integrated and the process being so easy has been very helpful. Updating biographical data in one system and having it push out to wherever is necessary is a big time saver.

Most of the integration is fairly easy - however, there does seem to be some amount of finger pointing if a problem arises in the integration where both sides blame the other for something's failure to work. We have been able to always get things to work satisfactorily, but sometimes getting to the end result is a little more difficult than it should be