by: Amanda Cose, Principal Consultant
Have you ever spent hours building and testing something in your Blackbaud CRM™ staging environment, only to repeat the work in your development environment? Did you know you can easily copy certain things like code tables and ad-hoc queries from one environment to another? You sure can! While not everything can be transferred between environments with ease, there are several options available that will save you time and effort.
Some of the things you can copy between environments include:
Code tables (all or selected)
Batch templates
Ad-hoc and smart queries (all or selected)
Export definitions (all or selected)
Prospect plan outlines
Smart fields (all or selected)
System roles
An organization I worked with created and tested a new smart field within its staging environment. When it was thoroughly tested and ready to be deployed, we used the configuration export to copy the new smart field from staging to production by following these steps, which are repeatable for any export instance available in Configuration Export.
In your staging environment, navigate to the Administration functional area, click on Configuration Data, and select Configuration Export.
Click to Add, then populate the Name and Description (optional) fields.
Scroll through the available export instances and double click on the one that meets your needs (in this example, we selected Smart Fields).
A box appears that allows you to export all smart fields or selected smart fields. In this example, we chose to export selected code tables.
Select the smart field you wish to export from the dropdown menu and click OK.
Save the export, then click on the chevron next to it and Export Data.
Download and save the .xml data file.
In your production environment, navigate to the Administration functional area, click on Configuration Data, and select Configuration Import.
Choose the .xml file you saved in step 7 and save.
Depending on what you export/import, you may need to add or adjust permissions for others to view and use. You may also use this process to move something from production to staging, if needed. And that’s it! Enjoy the extra time you will have now that you can implement this process in your work.
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