Scott, We tried turning off the virus scanning, etc. and we didn't see any measurable difference in Student Billing performance. On our test set-up for the conversion from SB ver 6 to SB ver 7, it took 22 seconds to open a student record and then 15 more seconds for the activity to appear on screen. We've put off upgrading until Blackbaud figures out why this happens and what they need to do to fix it. It's still very, very frustrating. Kathy Coccia-U of D Jesuit High School & Academy

Having converted our HQ instance of AFN to FE as well as our 4 affiliate schools (and continuing to have poor to marginal response time as noted back in October... see below), we are now looking ahead to converting the 3 schools who use Student Billing from V6 to V7. Given what I'm reading, it sounds like that is a further performance drag. Should I be considering holding off on the upgrade until BB remedies this? Is performance poor with FE V7 while still using SB V6?.... or did it further degrade after converting to SB v7?

Kathy, That's a very long time to load a student. We open a student directly onto the activity tab and we see a 6-8 second delay before the record is usable. I do have two pieces of advice: 1) do not underestimate the hardware requirements; 2) if you can, wait until v7.7 comes out (in April-June time period). Blackbaud (and I have to state that their credibility with me is quite low) has mentioned that the beta tests have shown a marked decrease in load times. They did a test convert on my DB and report that load times have dropped to 1-2 seconds. Now, I have to mention that BB did the test, not me, so my mileage (and yours) may vary. Bear in mind this is the same company that sent me on a wild goose chase insisting it was either my network or my hardware that wasn't running their software properly and only after we ran every goose down did they admit (kinda) it was their software. BB is very good at appearing to want to help, but true help is slow coming. I hold my opinion of v7.7 until *I* actually see a 1-2 second load time.

Scott, I've been assured by our tech guys here that we have way more hardware than what Blackbaud is recommending. I'm encouraged by the beta testing of ver 7.7 and will wait for that release; but as you say, I won't believe it until I try it for myself. Thanks for your input. It really helps to know that it's not just us!! Kathy

Jim, You don't have SB7 & its slow? If that's the case, I'd be very wary of SB7.6. Might be best to wait for SB7.7 (see comments below). We never worked with FE7 & SB6, we just plunged in with FE7 when SB7 came out and apparently were one of the first schools to use SB7. I am curious to see if other schools still on SB6 have speed issues. Again, our main issues are with Student Billing. AP, GL, MCR seem sluggish in areas, but still workable.

"It really helps to know that it's not just us!!" Isn't that the case, and why a forum like this is valuable. When I first complained about the speed issue, Blackbaud was shocked (shocked!) that the software was slow. Four months of running server logs, work station logs, adding a CPU & ram, analyzing boot.ini files, more logs, more boot files before they said it was "normal". They really made it seem like SB was perfectly fine & the problem must lie with our systems.

We're on SB7 and still have about a 5-6 sec load from selecting the student to displaying the activity tab. I know our network traffice is clean...we're on MSDE but I'm planning up upgrading to SQL soon. Don't know if that will help but we're going to greatly increasing the connections requiring the change to SQL. I don't recall what our record count is but it's not really that huge.

It really will not matter about the change from MSDE to SQL. We currently use SQL 2000 Enterprise with a machine that has the latest dual XEON processors, 12 Gig of RAM, Raid 5 and have 4 FE users. All response time is like working on an old 8086 IBM cpu - slow!!. BB hasn't a clue what is wrong and has sent me to Microsoft for "Gaming speedups." (Which by the way don;t do any good. Until BB comes up with a better program, I guess all users of FE/EE have been duped. We have even thought of going back to AFN/SB6 and re-entering the data just to get away from this product.

I like the last sentence. I am not sure how much data is integrated in SB and FE, but it is a good idea to separate these systems and process transactions by batch nightly. Since hardware costs are down, it may be a reasonable solution. We use FE and feed daily a batch of transactions from our Advance system.

Well, v7.7 is out, sort of. Just before the public release, I was informed by BB that they once again did a test convert on my database and this time found no difference in load times in Student Billing. Which I must say upsets me greatly. First they say it addresses the speed issue, and then they tell me no difference. Without addressing the speed issue, v7.7 is just lipstick on a pig: you can gussy it up, but its still a pig. To top it off, I tried to download v7.70.638 today to find that BB has pulled it from the download section without explanation, unless one counts: "The Financial Edge 7.70.638 Update is currently unavilable. We apologize for the inconvenience." as an explanation. Is there an issue with it? Is it coming back unchanged or are they incorporating patch 1 into it? [i]--- Edited at 6/4/2007 10:35:54 AM by Scott Pavao[/i]

If you read the last news BB states that there is a problem with carriage returns in FE 7.7 but it doesn't say any other reason why FE 7.7 download was taken off the website.

The News section notes that the carriage return issue ( and the deleted grade issue) was fixed in Patch 1, nothing about why the entire v7.7 was pulled. Makes no sense to pull it over two issues that are patched, unless BB considers either of those two issues serious enough to roll them into the main version. I don't believe they've done that in recent memory, though. We're pretty trained to install patches.

I think I found something. I just typed in version 7.7 errors in A/P and up came a bunch of problems with updating to version 7.7. It states to log in to the server as local administrator and rerun the update. But maybe that really doesn't fix the problem.The solution number is BB335090.