If you were to schedule a data import to run every third Tuesday of the month, the actual data file would have to be on the server ready to be processed at runtime (which would in this example be shortly after midnight on the morning of the third Tuesday). You are responsible for transferring the data file to your account on a Luminate-hosted server.
Warning: You must FTP two files to your account. One is the actual CSV, such as "marchDS.csv" file. The second is an empty file, a manifest that confirms to the data import software that the CSV is ready to be processed. That file has the extension ".manifest" and the same name as the CSV file. For example, if you named your data file "marchDS.csv" you would name your manifest "marchDS.manifest".
You must contact your account manager if you do not have a Luminate FTP server account.
Configure your FTP client as follows:
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hostname: customerftp.convio.net or clientftp.cluster3.convio.net (Luminate Client Care can specify)
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username: Contact Blackbaud Customer Support
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password: Contact Blackbaud Customer Support
For security reasons, the above IDs and password will only be provided to you by phone. Your username and password will work for both secure and insecure ftp.
Many modern FTP clients will use encryption just because it's available, with no special configuration. Others will require you to enable support for AUTH TLS. Details should be available to you in your software documentation. Use the option of port 21 to configure your ftp client for TLS/SSL (AUTH TLS explicit).
A command-line based FTP client, will probably encrypt the control channel by default. Be sure to issue the command PRIVATE ON before transferring files so that the data connections are also encrypted.
For security reasons Luminate does NOT support OpenSSH's SFTP. Despite the name, this is not an FTP-based protocol; rather, it is based on SSH.
Automatable CLI clients known to work include:
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Windows - MoveItFreely
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Linux/Unix - ftp-ssl (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ftp-ssl/) or preinstalled with Debian apt-get.
For a Windows GUI client, it is recommended to use SmartFTP or FileZilla. We have also used WS-FTP-Pro in the past.