Tag Archives: Raiser’s Edge

Resetting The Raiser’s Edge Password

I notice that Blackbaud now has a utility out that handles Supervisor password resets without going through the faxing rigamarole, but when I had to do this I don’t know if that would have been a big help anyway as my customer A) Needed supervisor access to Raiser’s Edge right away and B) They had fired the one employee who had both supervisor access and was the Blackbaud support user.

The two things I did have though was administrator access to the Raiser’s Edge MS SQL database and the SQL Server Management Studio.  My quick and dirty fix was to open the database (re7), open ‘tables’ and then find the ‘USERS’ table (dbo.USERS).  I then right-clicked the table and then chose ‘open table’.  There is one other thing that’s needed for this procedure at this point: a password that is known.  In this case I had the one’s below:

I’ll point out that I put no energy into checking out the hashing code used (i.e., can the PASSWORD field be blank?  Are the passwords hashed the same on every RE install?, etc.).  In this case all I did was copied the PASSWORD hash field from an account whose password was known to the Supervisor PASSWORD field.  (It goes without saying that I also backed the database up first (right click the database->tasks->Back Up…))