I keep wondering if the Alpha sites might want to let the rest of us know what they have learned about Affiliations now that they are up an running that they wish they knew when they were setting things up
Being a Beta site and looking at the first pass of test data in v. 11 --I know there are few things I wished I understood a little better and had a tool that would have helped in dealing with Affilations coding. I am sendingi this out to the community in hopes that the Alpha and other Beta sites might chime in.
Our AppSupport folks have been great at getting the data converted but while we were working to get the data clean for the initial pass there was another layer -- that of coding the Affiliations so they appear correctly in v.11 which was missed.
What I have finally begun to develop is a spreadsheet to track all the components across the 3 tables used (Affiliation, Relationship and Customer Type). It would be great if the Migration package could provide a report that would provide this same information from the tables themselves for reveiw by Development and other departments who then mark up for updates to the AppSupport. Missing from below is Show Salary.
Having this would also assist in testing to see if things behave the way we thought it would.
In just using this spreadsheet it helped me see how I might break out the 4 standard Relationship Categories. For instance once in v.11 -- it becomes apparent that Family should be Family and Extended Family.
In this way adult children and/or mother-in-laws don't become part of an empty-nester Household.
Employment is another Relationship Category that will want to be expanded in its affiliation types so they can be ranked for display as well and to exclude employee affiliated only for matching gifts purposes from jumping ahead of Executive/Managment.
Hope this helps some of you and I'd love hear more about how folks are navigating through things.
Just one more thing -- I want to thank whoever it was who added the Bill Gates data to the Sandbox. Stumbling across that helped me understand so much more about Affiliations etc.