Data Moose provides Blackbaud clients with hosted data warehouses for Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®. Everything we do is based on the SKY API, and the data model includes the available fields. Our hosted data warehouses allow users to build custom reports, integrate with other systems, or just have the peace of mind knowing your data is backed up and fully within your control.
The good news is that if you are 100% satisfied with canned reports in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, you wouldn’t! But institutions that need complex custom reporting through Power BI, Tableau, and F9,or integration with external data sets, will need to transition to a fully API powered approach. Data Moose simplifies and de-risks this process by automatically populating a refreshed data warehouse on a hosted server that your organization controls.
Based on information from Blackbaud, when the transition is completed to NXT, clients will need to use the SKY API for all data access, including reporting. Data Moose clients should expect to rewrite and update legacy reports to use the new data model derived from the SKY API. It will not match the old exports and queries, which were based on the old data model. While this may pose a level of inconvenience, once your reports match the SKY API data model, you should be good to go for years to come. And as Blackbaud enhances the SKY API with new data points, Data Moose will keep your warehouse up to date and current with any changes to the API.
While Blackbaud is a large company with enormous resources, at their heart, their focus is making industry-leading software. Data hosting was a legacy project for Blackbaud; one that did not conform to the future-facing API programming that is the basis of the NXT platform. It is our understanding that they are getting entirely out of the hosting business, and this is no longer an option. Please contact Blackbaud support for more information.
Not Currently. Data Moose connects through Blackbaud’s SKY API in a read-only direction into a data warehouse. We do not write back to either Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® or Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®. In theory, your developers could use our data as the basis of an integration, but your technology team would need to work out how to write back the data to Blackbaud systems.
Pricing for Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT and Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT are based on number of FE users and RE constituents. Your account representative can quote you a specific amount based on your current and future needs.
Once we receive a signed agreement from you, we will start provisioning your hardware. While we are provisioning your hardware, you will connect your environment to our Marketplace application and authorize us to access your data. Once the provisioning is done and authorization has been given, we will start the initial load of your data. Based on the size of your data, the initial import can take anywhere from a couple of hours to several days for large data sets with millions of records. Ongoing updates only synchronize the changes, so they are much smaller and take place on an automated schedule, keeping a fresh copy of your NXT data available when you need it.
Data Moose future-proofs your data warehouse by conforming to Blackbaud’s preferred data access methodology. APIs allow software vendors to create a highly secure gateway into your database, while conforming to computing best practices. For context, Blackbaud uses the SKY API to feed data to their web interfaces. By adopting this same approach, Data Moose can ensure that your custom reports, integrations, and analytics will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
All clients use a hosted SQL Express database on a Windows server that we provision. Data Moose utilizes OVH Data Centers. Clients connect using a highly secure VPN tunnel and may use this server however they wish, including installing and running analytic and reporting tools. As part of implementation, Data Moose can upgrade SQL Express to a client’s full version of SQL Server.
Each customer’s data in our cloud resides on a dedicated server with its own network, switch, and firewall. For added security, we require end user connections to be maintained within an SSL VPN utilizing 8192-bit Military Grade RSA key encryption. In plain English, our team of network professionals creates a secure point-to-point connection between our servers and yours using a private VPN. Data Moose does not provide any data to the public and our servers are not available on the public internet. In terms of Blackbaud data access, Data Moose is based entirely on the highly secure SKY API conforming to Blackbaud’s most recent, and strictest, security guidelines.
Absolutely! We believe that your server, like your data, should be yours to control. Feel free to connect to other data sets in SQL, install your fully licensed SQL Server, and even download analytics software like Tableau or Power BI.
It is your warehouse. It is up to you. We keep it full of the freshest NXT data and you can bring in outside data as you like.
Good news, we have a white labeled integration. Reach out to your Infor sales representative for details.
Data Moose maintains a 7-day* running back-up of your data warehouse, and in the highly unlikely event of a disaster, we would only need to synchronize database changes that took place since the last backup. If something were to happen to our primary data center, we failover to a new location. *Longer times available
Each client may define a time and frequency for automated data warehouse synchronization. We have some clients updating every few hours, but most find that once a day may be all they need. Whatever your needs, Data Moose will accommodate. The choice is yours.
