Hi folks! I apologize for the inconvenience here, we did push it out to everyone but I'm told that there's a cache clearing that has to run per environment and that's currently in process of looping through everyone and they don't think would take any longer than 24 hours to complete all schools. And it was kicked off this morning so if you still don't see it by tomorrow morning please let me know!

This feature is also not yet in our environment.

This update has not appeared in our system yet. Everything is the same.

Hi Angela,

Here's that idea from our art teacher.

A better way to contact students/parents/advisors. It would make our lives so much easier if under a student's name we could click on Message and have a drop down menu with these choices:

-student

-student and parents

-student and advisor

-student, parents and advisor

Hi all, if anyone would like to have the EAP (early adopter) switch for inbox enhancements turned on for your school would you kindly private message me here or send me an email - angela.addison@blackbaud.com so I can get you the details? I'm hoping we can get 20 or so schools to kick the tires. Please don't comment to everyone here as that could quickly become a lot of noise given the number of votes on this. We should be ready to flip the switch for volunteers in the next week or two!

Angie, I am so thankful your team took this task on and I am also glad to hear you are not just addressing the reply all feature, but will also consider other items "under the hood" related to messaging. Below are several other ideas related to messaging controls by either grade level, persona, or user that would also be extremely useful to be implemented. The last one also mentions allowing Platform Managers to delete a message for any reason. When someone sends something inappropriate to a large group, it would be way better to be able to remove it immediately instead of having to turn off messaging for everyone and then having to wait for a Blackbaud technician to remove it.

Messaging Function Controls

Individual Student Messaging Controls

Turn Messaging off for Groups of Students/ Delete messages

Thanks for your team's work on this and your consideration of these other ideas. :-)

Hi all, I've only been here a year and a half (not quite yet) so I can't speak to the history too much except that my understanding was at some point there was a cross-product vision of a universal messaging feature which lives with an enterprise team and so individual apps were sort of in a wait and see when that's coming mode. And the team that owned communications features has had really big architectural fish to fry the last couple of years so some of these areas admittedly were stalled. The good news is we've moved some of these features to other teams who have more bandwidth. My team just took over communications features so although a little late to the game are super excited to get this one in the works! We already met on it this week and cooking up mocks. I hope to be able to squeeze it in over the next month or two. @Betsy Sidebottom number of votes is definitely a factor but, don't lose faith on some of the ones without a huge number because the other way we prioritize is that we prefer not bouncing around and opening up code all over the app all the time so, when there is critical mass of number of requests in a certain area that we're planning on working on we'll evaluate all of the requests out there on that feature for relevance and fit with the new design and grab any of them that we can in the scope of that work.

Literally sat at my desk and clapped when I saw this announcement! (Though I too am puzzled why it took so long--we've wanted to use this tool and simply never turned it on.) Please give us an ETA on when it will be implemented--there are a LOT of people who waited a long time for this!

I suppose this is good news. However, I'm VERY disheartened that it has taken OVER 5 YEARS! Our school doesn't use messaging because of the reply all problem.

On a bigger scale....this just furthers my cringe-worthy reaction every time a support consultant tells me to submit an idea....but when I see there are ONLY 5 votes for something.....I know there's no way the idea will happen anytime soon or be considered as something important - even though it might be SO IMPORTANT for our school.

545 Votes and 5 years. Yikes....

Plus there are often other ideas out there that are similar. Oh so sad. (I see this was merged with other ideas. Not sure how long something like that takes either.)

Hooray for moving to the Planned stage!

Great news!! We've been waiting too long for this. It was one of the reasons why some teachers decided to switch to Google classroom. What is the ETA for this? Thanks.

REJOICE

Huzzah for finally getting this into the PLANNED stage. It is a long time past due!!

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This is critical. A parent accidently replied to a teacher email about the start of the year and it went to hundreds! This could be very powerful and should definitely be a priority.

I think you ought to have the ability and time to make the inbox messaging more sophisticated. We like the feature, but the lack of control is very frustrating at times.

Joining the litany, it's time to give us a viable messaging tool in our LMS. Reply all should be a managed feature not a global part of the system.

Another awesome idea that has been around for years.

PLEASE consider this.
I agree with the most recent comment where a school said they can't use this feature until it's worked on. We were in the same boat but considering the situation with coronavirus and the need to quickly message with a grade.....we might have to turn this on.

Or why at least isn't this a feature by role? Allow bulk messaging for students.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE MAKE AN EFFORT TO WORK ON THIS!

Hello? BB? We cannot use this tool until the reply-all default is deactivated.  A fix is long overdue. 

Any updates on this? We've already had a panicked parent and a new student that was very concerned about replying all by accident. We especially want our new students to feel comfortable using our system without the fear of accidentally writing something to their entire grade. It's a lot harder for students, especially new students, to recover from something like this socially.