ACS (ChMS) and PCO integration … Dead for now

As I have discussed in previous posts  [1] , [2] and [3] we would love for synchronization or sharing of data between our ChMS and Planning Center Online.  My recent push has been to get the sync to work for ACS and PCO, obviously because that would impact us most because we use ACS. 

In our conversations with PCO Owner Jeff Berg we found out that PCO had plans to synchronize with multiple ChMS products not just ACS, which was great.  In that conversation multiple staff from ACS talked thru how to make the APIs work and for PCO to integrate. It looked like we finally had progress to an integrated solution not just for ACS but all Church Management systems.

Then turn the page a couple months later, and this week I was disappointed to receive the email below, which I totally can understand but disappointed none the less.

Hey Jason,

I just wanted to let you know that we have decided to kill our "SharpSync" project for now. We have been working on it for over a year and just have not seen any fruit from it. The complexities of working with different schemas & APIs are too big of a hurdle for our small team to attack…

 

We have had a long discussion this morning about integration and the difficulties in what we were trying to accomplish. We have found this too large of a task for us to accomplish.  This is not just with ACS but with all of the other ChMSs we were talking to. We have spent over a year and a lot of cash doing this and just haven’t found a reliable way to integrate with all of the ChMS systems out there.  Every time we thought we were clear we would run into a hurdle with an API or data consistency issue.

We have discussed this with some other ChMSs and some have decided to integrate from their end…

I’m really sorry for this, I was very excited for this project but it just didn’t work.

Thanks!

Jeff

So if you who have asked about such a tool, I encourage you to contact your ChMS and see if there is a way to make this project work.  If you are an ACS customer contact Sally Grantham and let her know your needs and interests.

I will stay to the PCO crew, thanks for the effort, and I still hope that we can see this product work.

Wordpress to Tweets to a Facebook Fan Page

Recently our Communications and Technology initiative has been working to navigate how we as an organization are using / will use some of the social media tools… we are calling this our social media experiment (an experiment because we don’t know the outcome nor really the steps we’ll use to get to stated outcome).

As part of experiment we were wanted to reuse the content that was already being created by several of our blogs on our wordpress.mu server we host.  These blogs can push to our @NwoodsChurch twitter account and since that is already happening we wanted to consume the twitter content on Facebook as well.

The are are several Facebook applications that claim to work for consuming a twitter feed and posting it on Facebook, but we quickly learned that what works on a normal Facebook profile doesn’t always work for a Facebook Page for an organization.

So after a bit of time of trial and error and ignoring the step by step instructions for each application that just didn’t work, we found a solution (which i am documenting here for your use as well as my recollection should I ever need to recreate the process).

There were two main apps we tried: the “official” Twitter Application and Selective Twitter Status.  Both claim they can push updates into a Fan Page Wall but we found only Selective Twitter to work.

The one major drawback to Selective Twitter is the requirement of using #fb (hash tag) in each tweet.  Since our twitter account is a branded account for our organization and not someone’s personal account all tweets are applicable to go to Facebook… but this application requires the hash tag.

When installing either application if you are already using one of these apps to post to your profile’s wall your not going to have great success trying to push those updates or another twitter accounts updates to your Fan Page’s wall.

Solution, create a company alias (profile) account and make that new account an admin for the page in addition to your profile (or other Admins for your fan page).

1. With the company account login to Facebook and navigate to the editor for your Fan Page.
2. Choose Browse More in the More Applications tool.
3. Search for Twitter and choose Selective Twitter Status
4. Choose the option Add to my Page.

5. In the “Add Selective Twitter Status to your Page” window Select the your Fan Page you are configuring.
    – Don’t choose “Application” unless you would like to also install the App for your profile as well.
6. The next time you browse your applications on the Edit page for your Fan Page you will see Selective Twitter.  Choose Edit to configure the Application.
7. On the Edit page you will see 4 tabs select the tab “Your Fan Pages”

8. Select the page you would like to have the tweets display (if you manage only one page you won’t need to choose a selection)
9. Enter your Twitter Username
10. Check has permission and then Save.

Now all tweets for the username entered above will appear as updates to the wall of your Fan Page when they are tagged with #fb.

When using Wordpress Plugin “WordTwit” you can add #fb to the message field in the general options so all tweets from the blog are pushed into twitter then consumed by Selective Twitter Status to display on your Fan Page Wall.  Below we configured the faith stimulus stories blog to push all posts to twitter with the hash tag #fb.

vmware Midwest Users Group

For those in central Indiana or the Midwest this is a FREE event you might want to plan to take in.

The Indianapolis VMUG invites you to join us for our 2nd Annual Midwest "Back to School" Demo Days 2009 on Thursday, August 6th at the University Place Conference Center and Hotel (on the campus of IUPUI).

Join other VMware users for this FREE knowledge-packed day as we network, share ideas and learn how to get the most out of your VMware solutions. There will be live demos and presentations throughout the day!

Agenda:

07:00 – 08:00am – Registration

08:00 – 08:30am – Keynote / Opening Remarks

08:45 – 11:45am – Demonstrations & Presentations

12:00 – 01:00pm – Lunch and Expo

01:00 – 04:00pm – Demonstrations & Presentations

04:00 – 05:00pm – Reception (open bar & hors d’oeuvres)

We’ll also be featuring:

• Hands-on labs using VMware View and Wyse Thin Clients
• Wii Lounge
• Course Offerings Onsite by Avnet Technology Services
  (for an additional fee)

The VMUG Team

ACS Pre-Convention Day (Roundtable & Checkpoint 201)

Today we had a great crowd at the ACS Church IT Roundtable.  As always I got really jazzed and fired up from the peer learning and community that are parts of all CITRT events.  There were a lot of new people to meet, and I also enjoyed getting to know some CITRTers I had talked with but never met…. Like Jeff Suever Great to meet you!

The conversation was great and I even got to shamelessly plug CITRT.org for those who haven’t’ heard of it… thanks Dean.

The afternoon consisted of the Checkpoint 201-Launching Checkpoint Successfully in your Church pre-convention workshop… This was a great group and we had a lot of fun sharing our experience and hearing how others are planning to launch Checkpoint for their ministries. 

As I noted in the workshop we are more than happy to share anything we have learned or produced during our Checkpoint launch that you might be able to use for your ministry.  Most of today’s content is now listed below but we’ll continue to add and update items as time goes on (Download Content Updated June 9th to include additional content).

If you have questions about launching Checkpoint or would like to share your story with us we would love to hear from you.

• Workshop Power Point (PDF)
• Registration form (PDF)
• Program Insert (PDF)
• Website FAQs (Web)
• Training Documents (PDF) (DOCX)
• Self Service Kiosk Instruction Pannel (PDF) (JPG)
• Self Service Kiosk Instruction Pannel – Draft 1 (PDF)
• Self Service Kiosk Signage (PDF)

Indy Motor Speedway

After a great morning session (see Session 1 and Session 2 for Notes for the details of the info presented in the Road Show Presentation) at the the Sonicwall Road show presentations we headed over to the Indy Motor Speedway for the lunch and afternoon festivities.

Sonicwall provided lunch in one of suites above the track near the start/finish line.  There was an awesome spread of food and great conversation.

After lunch we headed to the Garages and Pit Road during the Firestone Indy Lights Qualifying.  We had a great time checking out the cars of the Indy Cup drivers as well as the Indy Lights.

Here are some photos from the afternoon… go here for all the photos.

Sonicwall Roadshow Part 2

Dee Bhatia – CDP Regional Sales Manager

Slides of CDP “Suite
Local Backup
CDP to CDP
CDP to Local Archive
Bare Metal – Acronis Backup w/ Sonicwall Logo

Neil Jones
Email Security Specialist
njones@sonicwall.com
602-458-0728

Spam Math: 2005 30 billion per day 2009 140 billion messages per day
Does Spam Pay: Howard Carmack sends 10m emails per day earns $200k per year

Product Updates:
Backspatter Attacks were added Last fall
Apply Real-Time reputation to an email’s text, picture, URL, etc

“5 Minute updates is key, Updates once per hour is not sufficient [for spam filtering]”.

Leverage the 1million plus firewalls and offer customers basic Spam services as a add-on to the existing products.

Sonicwall Demo Site: LiveDemo.Sonicwall.com

Available Promotions
”Three and Free” buy three years of UTM and get the appliance free

Sonicwall Roadshow Part 1

Dolph Smith– Sonicwall SE

One of the largest threats we face is the content “we” create: Wikipedia, Facebook, etc.

Not every threat is web based.

Dave Perry – Director of Software Engineering

Ten Things your Firewall Should Do
What are your employees doing? Web Surfing, Twitter, Facebook, Downloading files, IM, Video, Games, Email

Facts at work:
25% of employees do peer to peer sharing
16% of men 8% of women admit viewing pornography at work
25% of the office internet traffic is non-business related

Non-Traditional Malware
Prediction – Malware disguised as “Benign social networking links” will be the top threat to data security in 2009 “HiJacks your need to be liked”

1. Manage Streaming video
2. Bandwidth management

3. Webmail Data Loss
4. Application use enforcement
5. Deny FTP upload
6. Keep P2p2 apps under control
7. Manage streaming music
8. Prioritize Application bandwidth
9. Block Confidential Docs
10. Block/log forbidden files

Product Updates
UTM Products

SonicOS 5.5 Update (Due out in Fall)

- SSO Improvements
- 4WAN links
- Active/Active UTM (UTM processing on HA host spare)

Content Filter “We know we have dropped the ball” we have 4 people working on that project and expect a more enterprise robust feature set by fall.

Late Night Tour

While in Indy Jeremie and I wanted to meet up with other Church IT RoundTable people and we were able to connect with David Szpunar.

We Had Dinner with David, Tom Templin, and Mark Moreno

After Dinner we had a VERY LATE night tour of Lakeview Christian Center with David. We started the tour at around 11:30 PM, but David gave an awesome tour, and we didn’t even stand in once place for more than 5 minutes!

Here are a few Shots from our Tour.
 
 
 
 

For more photos of our Tour of Lakeview Check out the Sonicwall Road Show Set here.

Central Illinois VMware User Group Meeting

Limited seating…REGISTER NOW
VMUG Agenda
~~~~~~~~~~~
6:00pm – Welcome
6:10pm – vSphere (with demo)
7:10pm – Break
7:25pm – Site Recovery Manager (with demo)
8:30pm – Breakout sessions
9:00pm – Adjourn
Location
~~~~~~~~
Illinois State University
Alumni Center
1101 North Main
Normal, Illinois 61761
Directions: http://tinyurl.com/osb26y

• Building closes at 4:30pm, but will reopen at 5:30pm ****

Preventative Maintenance Plan

At our recent IT Roundtable, Preventative Maintenance plans came up in our discussion and I mentioned that we had started writing a plan that gives our team some guidelines.  Granted this preventive maintenance plan is in no way a complete or exhaustive guide, we have started getting our plan on paper. 

We use this policy and procedure guide to actually perform the maintenance but also as guide for what we want to see happen.  At the RoundTable I mentioned one of the most helpful reminders for us has been to add the items from this plan to recurring tickets in our helpdesk system.  When a task is due we are sent a reminder and it stays there until we complete the task.

After the RoundTpreventative-maintenance-planable a couple people asked if the P&P document was on my blog… I hadn’t ever thought of posting it until now…. so borrow away.. I hope it gives you a kick start to start writing you plan! preventative-maintenance-plan

I would love feedback via email or comment or if you you would like to share your preventative plans with us email jason[at]jasonmlee[dot]net.