ACS Backup during Updates

Dear ACS Technologies,

Why is your update installer configured only to occasionally run a backup during the updates?  Historically it has been hit or miss if the updater would run a backup as part of the update process, so as a result we run a backup before every update…. Then sometimes your updater runs a backup too.  Suddenly a 30 minute update now takes well over an hour. 

Additionally rumor has it the backup that runs during the update process has proven un-reliable or makes a corrupt backup that is not usable.

So I have a couple requests:

• In the release notes, please note if the backup is going to run as part of the update sequence so I can plan to waste the extra 30-45 minutes during the update.
• Give us the option to disable in update sequence backup… I am fine with this being a command line switch but please let me choose when the backups are going to run. 

Thanks,

Jason

New ACS Pre-Convention Workshop!

As I previously mentioned, I am really excited about the 2009 ACS Convention… Not only will the new product announcements be exciting, but I really enjoy getting to hang out with my peers at other churches to talk tech and dream about how we can help our ministries become better!  I also am really excited to meet many other ACS clients that I have talked with or corresponded with via blogs and twitter but have never met face to face. 

But now for the exciting news!

We have just finalized arrangements for our team to arrive early to the ACS Convention because of an exciting event on Tuesday afternoon.  ACS has asked us to help host a pre-convention workshop, Let’s Go!  Launching Checkpoint Successfully in your Church.  The focus is for those planning to roll out checkpoint to get a first hand look at the 3-6 month process we walked thru partnering with our Children’s Ministry, Communications and Media Teams to smoothly deploy Checkpoint. 

If you are planning to deploy Checkpoint in your church, make plans to attend both Pre-Convention Workshops: Checkpoint 101 and then  join us Launching CheckPoint Successfully Tuesday afternoon.

Let’s Go!  Launching Checkpoint Successfully in your Church

• Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Getting the ACS software solution in place is just one part of the successful launch of a new program.  In this class, we’ll look at all the other elements needed to start up a new check-in system in your church, and help you get started planning for success in your church.

We’ll dig in deep with Northwoods Community Church to explore how they updated their check-in systems with new hardware, new software, and new processes.  You’ll have a chance to examine the fingerprint scanner system now in use at NWCC, and hear first-hand from members of the team who made it happen. Topics covered include IT, Communications, Volunteer Training, and Budgeting.  Real-life examples of emails, videos, training sessions and more will bring ideas and inspiration for a successful launch in your church.

Whether your church is starting a check-in ministry for the first time, or you’re looking at updating your current processes, you’ll benefit from this session.

ACS AD Sync Alpha testing Project

As mentioned in the previous post, we have been Alpha testing a AD Sync tool to synchronize contact information from the ACS database into Outlook contacts.

Over the past 6 months we have been working with Dean Lisenby and the team at ACS thru the concepts as well as logistics of a tool to make contact info from ACS accessible thru Outlook Contacts.  Dean and his staff have developed a utility that will push the contact list from our AccessACS site into contacts in an Active Directory Container.  Each person is imported with telephone, email and address.  Because the contact information is now in AD, it also makes these contacts available to your Exchange/Outlook users via the Global Address Book.  You can find contact information or email individuals from within the Global Address book in Outlook without any external lookup or .CSV import.

We have been Alpha testing this tool, in our lab environment (read below for the details of the setup), and the proof of concept works, now the question is it something that other ACS customers would use and should ACS put resources into developing it.

The major benefit I see in this tool is being able to to have your users keep contact info in the ACS database not in the local contact lists, where by the nature of a local contact list is not accessible to other users. Updating that information in the ChMS your users have the most up to date information in a common data store (ACS) AND it becomes available to them in Outlook in the Global Address book.

Details of our Lab and Testing:

We have been Alpha testing this product in our test lab which consists of a P2v (Physical to Virtual) of our Exchange server, our first Domain controller and an XP workstation with Outlook installed.  We put this test lab in on its one VLan and routed it to its own private interface on our firewall.

The VLand and private interface allowed us to use VMware server in NATed mode and have two mirror environments (production and testing) that have identical Domain, and Exchange configurations.

Before our testing, Dean had only tested the tool on a Small Business Server and we wanted to confirm that there were no variables in our environment.

Currently the tool will pull all the contact information from the ACS dataset and push them into a AD Container called AccessACS.  If there is anything in the container it overwrites the contents with the new import as this isn’t a Sync tool yet.

From Outlook the user can browse the Global Address book and you can see all your “contacts” from ACS.

Some items we noted in our testing that we would like to see addressed before the product would be publicly available would include:

• Could this container appear in a sub section of the GAL?  Currently the Items import right into the root of the GAL it would be nice when browsing from Outlook that you have all your Domain Users listed with a “folder of sorts” that houses the ACS list (in our case its over 24k names)
• The formatting of our AD domain is: lastname, First name it would be helpful if the import could be customized to match the formatting of display names.  This would allow for the GAL to be an alphabetical by last name list.
• We already have 2-3 dozen of these people in as AD contacts, because they are Board of Directors, Board of Elders etc.. and on global distribution lists… if the sync didn’t overwrite the contacts that were existing in the Access ACS list then those distribution groups could be pointed to the contacts that come from ACS and we wouldn’t have to mange those individually.
• A flag on each record at import would be needed since when each contact is added they need to be an Exchange contact for Outlook to be able to email them.  This is great, except we don’t want non domain  users to email any contact in our database because they know you could send an email to firstnamelastname@domain.com If the import would flag the recipient as only allowed to receive messages from a Domain security group that problem would be a non issue.
  • The solution needs to be part of the import because you cannot in AD choose multiple contacts and configure the restriction that limits the senders to these contacts.
• I really like the fact that if a change is made in ACS then those changes would be made in Outlook
• If this were in production, I won’t get any emails more emails from attendees saying “I have told you to update my email but staff continue to email my old email address”.

I think this could be a great ACS tool, but we need to know if others besides NWCC would use it so we can make a business case to ACS to develop the tool.  If you are interested please leave a comment or email me at jasonlee {at} jasonmlee {dot} net.

More R&D with ACS; 24k Contacts in OUTLOOK?

We have been working with ACS Technologies recently beta testing several of their new products coming to market.  While the beta testing can be occasionally frustrating  we have really enjoyed dreaming about making the tools we use effective for our ministry as well as the other 40K+ others that use ACS products.

Almost a year ago I wrote a post “Wishing for More” asking for ACS to take the lead in the market and extend ChMS contact information into AD and the Global Address book.

Work on this project has continued and we have gotten past the point of dreaming.  ACS has tested this tool in their test environment and given us the utility to try an Alpha test in our lab environment.  There were minor bugs to work out but overall the tool works as expected and our test AD environment has 24,000 contacts in the appropriate container, contacts now accessible by “test” users from within the Outlook Global Address Book.

Now that the proof of concept has been done the question is being asked will anyone use it if ACS puts resources into refining and releasing such a product.  If you use ACS, AD and Exchange would you use this tool?  Do you see value in such a product being offered to you as a customer?
I think this could be a great ACS tool, but ACS needs to know if others besides NWCC would use it so they can make a business case whether or not to develop the tool for use in production.

If you read this post or the details of the testing in the AD Sync Testing post and you answer YES, to the question: Would you like contact info from ACS available and as simply accessible to your users as an Outlook contact? leave a comment or email me at jasonlee {at} jasonmlee {dot} net.

For details of the Alpha testing of this tool see the AD Sync Testing post.

ACS and PCO integration, Do you need it?

This week I started to re-kindle the discussion that was started last year regarding Planning Center Online (PCO) and ACS. 

The idea is to evaluate the possibilities and cost  of synchronizing data between ACS and PCO. 

We are going down this road with ACS to ask about custom development work, but I believe this is a need, beyond NWCC, that other ministries have.  Do you use PCO and ACS and see value in syncing the data between the two?  I am interested in your thoughts for two reasons….

One: It might not be a custom development project if others express interest (saving us NWCC dev $$)

Two: More importantly the more collaboration we have in the development the better product we could have in the end for everyone!

You interested…. Leave a comment or send me an email jasonlee [at] jasonmlee [dot] net

Why is a Sync Tool Important: 

If you aren’t familiar with PCO, you should venture on over to the site and watch the demo/training videos to get an idea of what all this great tool can do to help your teams.  The site says: “Planning Center Online is a centralized website where leaders can plan their service and easily communicate with their staff and volunteers.”

Our creative teams have been using PCO for service scheduling and planning for a little over a year and it has really changed that process for the better. Since this is a tool created by “Creative Types” for “Creative Types”, the design team really understood the needs and has provided really good tool to help with those needs.

PCO It does a great job of helping to schedule & communicate with volunteers, give a space for collaborative future planning as well a historical data to look back at past planning. PCO has a great interface to schedule volunteers and then let them know when they are scheduled and let them communicate back to the planning team.  PCO Live is a great feature that allows you to give visual cues to your tech people live in the service.

There are some things though that PCO doesn’t do well, the primary flaw is PCO is it quickly becomes another data silo for your ministry.  Because of the great communication and collaboration that happens “people” info is stored in PCOs database that isn’t easily used by or available to your Church Management Software (ChMS). 

So why is this a problem?  Your creative arts team is frequently in contact with their volunteers because of PCO does that well, but any changes or updates to demographic information has to manually keyed into the ChMS so so others in the organization can use that updated postal or email address. This is ok if you have one or two changes but think of trying to keep up with 200 volunteers and the volume of telephone number and email address changes in a month alone could be overwhelming.  Not to mention, your children’s ministry and student ministry teams may be using PCO for their planning too… Suddenly you have over 500 volunteers being “tracked” in PCO and there is no way to be sure that information is correlating to your data in your ChMS. 

Beyond contact information, PCO has great historical information of who is involved when/where and in what capacity.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could harness that information in your ChMS?  If you could push that historical info into your member’s activity information in the ChMS wouldn’t that improve internal communications between departments?  Example: If you were able to have your ChMS consume volunteering history data from PCO dynamically, you might not have the ‘unknown’ the person on the hospital list… but you would have them in the database and it would note he/she is newest jr high teach team member and you could contact the Jr. High Director to follow up with that new team member.

Ok, its a good idea, How can we do this?

Both ACS and PCO have documented APIs and are willing to improve the APIs to give us access to the data we need… we just need a development team to help make those two talk… We don’t have the skill set to make this happen on our own so that is why we have asked the costs and feasibility questions of ACS.  The more ACS clients interested the lower the “cost” and better the product.  PCO doesn’t have record of ACS customers who use PCO, so we have to ‘find’ that list on our own… ACS is willing to help make this happen, we just need to know you are interested!

Does such a Tool/Application exist?

From time to time we come up with a need for facilitating ‘sign-ups’ for events that aren’t one to one registrations.  Most events we say X number of participants can register for an event at a given time on a given day.  That’s pretty easy and there are a bunch of tools to facilitate online registrations.  We are currently using a Hybrid of ServiceU and Access ACS.   But sometimes you need registrations for “old school” sign-up boards and you have multiple slots for multiple times for one event… which could result in one event needing 10-12 “events” for registration.

Now for my wonderings… does such a tool or service exits to take the “old school sing up board” and make it an online tool?

An example of what am looking for looks like this…. An event occurs on a given day but the event is segmented into 20 minute blocks over 8 hours and each block can have 4-10 participants. 

It would be great to have an online tool/application that would allow individuals to “sign-up” for a slot and have the system send them a confirmation email and then make that time slot “unavailable” for all subsequent users.

So my question… does such a product already exist or should I proceed down a road of custom development?

Broadcast Beta 0.2

We have been beta testing (in-production) a new ACS product called Broadcast, for more on the Broadcast read here. 

I note that we have been using the beta application in production because the application even in beta is far better than what we replaced. Previously one of our staff had to daily key in data to PowerPoint slides to display event locations on our CCTV system.

About 18 months ago we began discussions with ACS product development to improve their scheduling tools as well as to utilize the information included in those databases for other uses… CCTV Displays, Digital Advertisement signage, Dynamic web pages, the list goes on and on.  One of the tools we needed  was a way to automatically pull data from our database and display the event information on our CCTV system for our attendees to know where on our campus events were taking place.  Broadcast has allowed us to dynamically “reuse” data that already exists in our campus scheduling application Facility Scheduler.  It has been tons of fun to see Broadcast come to reality from the dreaming of such an application with the ACS product development team to seeing one of the concepts out of the gate running.

Obviously running an application in Beta means there are going to be bumps in the road, and that was the case for Broadcast.  Over the past few weeks we have had to occasionally reset the application because the motion background turned to a static black image, or the system hang when it changed from an event list to static image when there were no events to display or the display locked up randomly with no explanation. 

Here are some thoughts from our experience of the Beta on the first weeks:

Hardware:

• The machine previously running the event displays was a 667 mhz with 320 mb of memory.  This quickly showed to be very inadequate to run a video background and the application. 
• MS’ suggested requirements are a P4 1Ghz with 512 of mb. 
• To run Broadcast we found at least 1 ghz and 1024 mb of memory were needed.

Application Settings:

• We found that you must pay much closer attention to the event’s start and stop time in Facility Scheduler than we have done before otherwise the events may not display at the right time.
• The default setting are for the events to scroll every 30 seconds, this was much too long for a tabular view of today’s events and we adjusted the time down to 15 seconds.
• Standardizing the list of rooms needs to be done in our Facility Scheduler, some were in caps others lower case.

We added our own custom video background and selected the view and setup we wanted to use and launched the application.  For a Beta overall it worked very well without many issues.  Here is a shot of one of our monitors running Broadcast with the day’s events.

But none of those problems were enough to go back to manually entering the day’s events onto PowerPoint slides.  Especially since ACS released an update to Broadcast and the update has improved a lot of the  bugs above, in fact the application with this update has run without any bumps for a week.  No system resets or dropped event lists.

ACS also updated the Tabular format to improve readability as shown in the screen shot below.  Events can now be grouped by start time which also accommodates longer event names and locations since the time isn’t inline with the event anymore.

The next version will include removing events after they occur through out the day… Currently the entire day’s events display until midnight and then the next day’s events are displayed.  In the next release Events will dynamically be removed from the list after a user defined period after the event start time. 

If you are interested in kicking the tires on the beta contact your ACS Account Manager, its worth a look.

Thanks for the update Darci and Page keep the updates coming!

hotel For ACS Convention ~ ONLY $55 per night

Our team has booked our travel for the ACS National Convention in Jacksonville Florida.  This is my first time to go to convention, but our continuing partnership with ACS made it a must do this year.  This event is in late may, but we have already booked the Airfare and Hotel.  Nothing too exciting about the airfare, but the hotel rate is GREAT!

If you haven’t ever used Priceline.com, Downtown Jacksonville Florida is the place to give it a try.  There is a process of “free rebidding” that can be used on Priceline (documented here) which depending upon the location gives you the ability to bid for hotel a bunch of times without waiting 24 hours between every bid.

What makes Jacksonville so special? There are 7 of 9 zones which don’t have the 3 1/2 star hotel level like the downtown zone.  This gives you almost a possibility of 125 free rebids. In the 3 1/2 star category  bidding for travel notes 3 hotels you might get: The Omni Hotel, The Hyatt or the Crown Plaza Hotel.  All the reviews of each hotel reported good things…So we were willing to stay at any of the 3 hotels.

I started with a ridiculously low bid of $25 and we got the Omni Hotel Jacksonville for $55 per room per night.  Yes, I hear you saying but that isn’t the official convention hotel… but it is only a 10 minute walk or a .7 mile drive. Another note the Omni has Complementary WiFi (very important). Save some cash, give Priceline a try. 

One note: when you are bidding and the site says “your close for $– you can have this hotel.” DON’T do it… all that means is you should start increasing your bids by just $1 until you get your rate (assuming you have enough bids left).  For me this “greeting” started at $47 and they wanted me to pay $65 to lock in the room.. by continuing the bidding process that dropped what we paid by $7 per room per night.

Now if you want to take a chance, my guess would be that you might have a good shot of getting the Hyatt hotel which is the official  convention hotel after the ‘hold’ on the rooms at the $105 rate expires on May 5th.

See you in Jacksonville!

ACS Desktop on a 2008 Terminal Server

Microsoft’s Terminal Server 2008 has a lot of new features which includes RemoteApp publishing.  This allows you to place icons on a user’s desktop and start menu and run with the same look and feel as the application being installed locally… but really running from the terminal server.

Set-up of ACS as a remoteapp was quite easy and has worked fairly well in our sandbox environment.

In our situation, we have datacenter licensing for Microsoft so adding multiple virtual servers isn’t an issue, so we have elected to Install the ACS database on one server and have the terminal server function strictly as an application server.  This changes some settings for the terminal server that I will note below.

The steps to deploy ACS as a remoteapp are as follows (assuming that you have already completed the Terminal Server 2008 installation):

1. Use the Install Application on Terminal Server option in Control Panel to install the program.

2. Install ACS Workstation by running the installer found in the Database servers ACSNet folder.

3. Browse to the WINACS directory on the Terminal server and give all domain users full read write permissions to the entire contents of that directory.

4. Next Add ACS People Suite and ACS Financial’s Suite to the RemoteApps by going to Server Manager > Roles > Terminal Services > TS Remoteapp Management

5. Add A remoteapp and select ACS People Suite and ACS Financial’s Suite in the list.

6. After you have added the application you need to create the Installer file to add the shortcuts to the workstations that will be using the RemoteApp

7. Next Choose a location to save your.msi installer.  This can be a UNC path to a network storage location.

8. Update the Start menu folder and select to add the desktop icons.  Note there are no files to associate with this remote application, so that box stays unchecked.

After you run the .msi installer you created with the wizard, the workstation will have the icons for ACS People and ACS Financial.  On first run it the terminal server will prompt for network credentials to access the Terminal Server.  Save these credentials for future use and the application will start up with no user interaction next time they launch the ACS application.

Once the user is logged into the terminal server the ACS login screen will display on the desktop as if it was a local application.

Now there were a couple "got-yas":

1. The permissions have to be configured for full read/write for all users on the Database ACSNET and WINACS as well as the Terminal Server’s WINACS directory.

2. When you use ACS via a remoteapp on a dual monitor system the login and application splash screens land in between both monitors.  This is due to the application’s programming to center on the screen when they start up and Terminal server sees the desktop as one spanned desktop.  You can use the configuration "span monitor:i:0" to disable monitor spanning but this limits the users from running the application on the monitor that isn’t the local systems primary monitor. I have contacted ACS and this is a item that is being addressed by the programming team.

3. As part of #2, you can move the running application to another location on one of the monitors if you allow spanning (enabled by default) and it will remember the location where you closed the application… it just won’t remember the location of where you had moved the login or splash screens.

4. When ACS is closed, the session on the terminal server is not logged off, rather the users session is left in a disconnected state.  We are looking at options of lowering the default logoff settings in the Terminal server to be sure that all users are logged off during backups on the Database server.

5. First login to the Terminal server when launching the RemoteApp the local profile has to be created and the login time is quite a bit longer than subsequent login times for the RemoteApp.

As always your mileage may differ, If you have tried this installation and have had other experiences let me know I would be interested in hear your experience.

New stuff From ACS Technologies

ACS Workstation Install with UNC Path

One of the frustrations with ACS desktop software on local machines was always having to map a drive back to the server for the desktop application to work… well not any more.  With the 10.0 update ACS did away with needing a mapped drive to connect to the database.

When you install the application, install it from the UNC Path to your ACSNET directory on the database server.  This path is "remembered" by ACS desktop and utilized by the application and there is no longer any need to map network drives.  Yea!

Note: If you are using the Old scheduling applications Ministry Scheduler this product is destined for End of Life and will not be updated to utlized the UNC rather than a mapped drive.

ACS Broadcast

I have talked about ACS Broadcast in the past and just got word last last night that the Beta is now publicly available. Broadcast will pull data directly from Facility Scheduler and display the days’ events on a monitor. 

There are a couple views (summary and tabular) and custom video and still backgrounds can be added.  Here are a couple previews from ACS:

Summary View

Tabular View

More info to come as we dive into the beta.

Check out the ACS Product development bog for more information