We are currently extremely disapointed with the quality of technical support offered for Patron Edge in the UK. Cases are taking months to be dealt with. We are continually being fobbed off with promises of improvements which fail to materialise. This is having an impact on the quality of service we offer to customers. I'd be interested to find out if any other venues are experiencing similar problems.

Grant, I feel your pain! The problem is even worse if you are integrated with Raiser's Edge. Since PE doesn't display the middle initial our PE people are told to put the middle initial in the first name field. Or course this syncs with RE so our RE people move the middle initial to the proper MI field. Also, the merge function has been changed so you have to merge the entire record and the merged record is deleted. If you integrate this affects Raiser's Edge even if the constituents to be merged are not patrons. In my opinion it takes months for cases to be dealt with because they are busy working on customizations. One org pays big bucks to have the customization written then when another org wants the same thing they get to pay again. That being said, some of these improvements may be in the latest updates and/or patches but we will never update during our season if at all possible. Every time we update we have many more problems that prevents our patrons from buying tickets. I'm disappointed in this product from Blackbaud. Michael Sherman Database Administrator Florida West Coast Symphony

We are almost finished with our RE PE integration and this message thread worried me to the point that I opened my record in PE and added my MI. While I don't see it displayed in the CRM Search Results screen, it is on the next screen - Client Portal. Is Blackbaud aware of your need and work-around? Barbara A. McCulloch Associate Director of Development Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Buffalo, New York B. McCulloch Manager, IST & Finance Kaleida Health Foundation Buffalo, NY

Like their other products, it's been hit and miss with PE support. Depends on who you get and what the problem is. We're not thrilled with the product, as we are currently having to reboot the server nearly daily because the print servers keep disappearing from the workstations. They don't seem to know what the problem is. We have not yet integrated tho are supposed to turn it on in April. I am not optimistic but my role is to restore from backup! We also only do an upgrade when it makes sense for us but it's mostly with FE where we've found support won't help unless you upgrade first. "Workstations update automatically" is only for those who allow every user local admin rights and we most certainly do not do that, so every upgrade is at the very least an all-day task for me.

Barbara, this is the response I got from customer support: ****** As it stands all of this is functioned via a stored procedure which would have to be completely revamped to allow for this functionality. In order to get this addressed it would have to be pushed up to our production team to review and implement. If you'd like I can go ahead and file this as such. For the time being the only options I can provide as an alternative method would be to sort out different clients by address or add the middle initial to the end of the first name so that it displays as part of the first name. This would thus allow you to still search on the last name without affecting your search. Please let me know if you have any other questions. ****** This just seems so basic. *meh* Michael Sherman Database Administrator Florida West Coast Symphony [i]--- Edited at 2/12/2008 10:43:11 AM by Michael Sherman[/i]