ACS Iphone Application Part 2 - Where’s the Love?”

So I was celebrating the launch of the iPhone App last week but I need to note some constructive criticism for the ACS team… The search functionality is great, except you can’t search for one person by their full name you can only search by last name.  After talking with R&D they are aware of the bug that returns results “NULL” “NULL” when you search on a first name last name or Last Name,First name.  It sounds like soon an update will be released that will search First, Last and Goes by Names and return those results correctly… sounds like a much better solution… so we’ll wait and see.

But my bigger concern is where is the love for windows mobile devices?  Why do I have to go down the hall to use Kirt’s iPhone to try out the new application?  If you can program a tool for iPhone then where is the Windows Mobile Application?

And a final question for this post… where is the Exchange Synchronization tool that was shared at the Spring convention?  Its been several months and we are still “wishing for more”.  To be able to access this information from Outlook would be a huge win for Northwoods and many other ministries… so where is the Love ACS?

ACS Webinar Guest Appearance

I had some great fun working with the team from ACS last week.  Darci Shelley (ACS R&D Lead) and the ACS team asked that I be a special guest on the MegaChurch Team Webinar and since I am always up for trying out something new I agreed to participate.

For the past few months they have been building the community and communication lines between the MegaChurch segment of the company’s customers thru webinars twice each month.  The webinars have included product road maps, current features and new features in the latest release of the software.

This week’s webinar focused on the Registration component of Access ACS, the updates to this component are expected to release in November and this includes some great interaction between Registrations and Facility Scheduler.  We have been working with the R&D team for 9 months on this integration are very excited to see it come to market.  After these changes are in place we will be moving back over to the ACS Registration suite from ServicU.  This progress will take us one step further in fully defining the work flow for organizing, scheduling, managing and hosting events for our ministries… and a large portion of that process will be automated.

Darci asked me to be on the webinar to talk about how ACS and Northwoods have worked together to improve this part of the product line and how it is improving our workflow.

It was a lot of fun to announce live the branding Northwoods.ME for our AccessACS (ACS on the web) portal and to be part of the ACS iPhone application announcement,  ACS ChurchLife!, all on the webinar!

I have said it before, ACS has the right people on their team and they continue to impress me.  I am continually reminded they are the right team at the right time for the needs of our ministry! 

I had a great time working thru the technical challenges of a live webcast from multiple sites with the ACS team.  I got to learn a lot about AdobeConnect, which continues to impress me.  We used our web cam and ACS made me a co-presenter and I was able to stream my video and audio and interact with the ACS team.

If you are an ACS customer and missed the webinar check it out in your client portal.

If you aren’t an ACS customer and you are just curious about the webinar and want to check out the recording post a comment and i’ll send you a link to watch the recording.

ACS Technologies iPhone Application

ACS released their iPhone application today.  The application allows you to search contact information out of your Access ACS database from the handset. 

The application is called ACS Church Life.

The search functions are very quick and from the search results you can easily email or call any contact.

Or map the addresses of the contacts.

I talked with the R&D team at ACS today and they are continuing development to improve the iPhone app.  The next addition to the iPhone app will be the ability to search events out of Facility Scheduler, so you can check the room and other information about your event.  Down the road it will even include access to connections and other modules in the ACS product suite.  This would allow pastors or others who need to note information about a hospital visit, phone call or other interaction with an attendee to make those notes in a secure location while out of the office and that information becomes immediately available to the teams who need it.

Great Job on a cool tool!

CITRT & MinistryTech Discount Code

A special discount code is being offered to all those invovled in the CITRT who are planning to attend MinistryTech/Spring CITRT 2008.

If you REGISTER before September 30, use the coupon code ‘CITRT’ for an ADDITIONAL 25% off the early bird rates!

CITRT and MinistryTech Spring 2008

The Church IT RoundTable (CITRT) is excited to announce a partnership with MinistryTECH to combine the Spring 2009 Church IT National RoundTable with MinistryTECH, to be held April 23-24, 2009 at Woodmen Valley Chapel in Colorado Springs.  We are collaborating with Terrell Sanders of MinistryTECH to plan the conference so that it includes the peer learning, community, and inspiration that are the hallmarks of the CITRT.  The combined event will have keynote sessions, breakout sessions, RoundTable sessions, a vendor fair, and ministry tours.  Mark your calendars now for an awesome time next April in Colorado Springs!

If you REGISTER before Sept 30th and use the coupon code ‘CITRT’ your early bird rate will be discounted by and additional 25%! 

Some Vendor Love

Recently we have started doing a little business with Zones (including the $300 Sony laptop Deal) and while talking to our rep Nathan I was giving him a hard time and said he should be showing us more love… He asked if a box of widgets was a good first step and we said we love free stuff so a few day later a box arrived with some cool widgets… including my favorites.. the Crucial Memory Hog and the Kaspersky Dancing robot.

Humongo Whiteboard on the Cheap Part 2

To answer some questions about our White board here is part 2 of the Humongo White board post.

What surface did you paint the Whiteboard on? 
The WhiteBoard paint can be painted on any surface.  If it is a new drywall wall you should plan to put the first coat of primier on first.  If it already has paint, just scuff up the exisiting paint, clean the dust and start painting.

Is it Spray Paint?: No, you use a foam roller to apply the paint.

Now you see it…. Now You don’t

Last week our media director, the new user of the MacPro, called and said his files were gone off a directory on his windows machine.  We use a shared directory on the PC in the tech booth as a temporary landing place for the media files that are going to be transferred to the hard drive based playback unit that plays all video for our main stage events.

We use this ‘transfer’ folder to stage the files to ftp to the Ederol since the internal FTP server on the Ederol is quite flaky and it helps sit right right at the unit to do the transfer (Roland said it doesn’t get any better so we found a good work around).

So a week after the MacPro and the newly reformatted G5 were in production we noticed files just disappearing out of the transfer directory.  After closer inspection the files would copy over the network, then when the file is completely copied it deletes off the PC.  File transfers from a PC to this directory work fine.  So we decided maybe its a root permissions issue in the OS so we reformatted the PC… but the problem remains.

We have specifically narrowed it down to file transfer from two macs and it only fails if there are no files in this directory.  If there is a blank .txt file in this directory all is good, if the directory is empty the copy from the Mac fails.

Worst thing about this is if we call either Windows or Apple support its going to be a blame game I am sure…

Nothing more frustrating than identifying the problem and having no solutions…. What are your Thoughts?

$300 Laptops!!!

My new Zones rep Nathan made me aware of a great deal about a month ago that we have just taken advantage of and I want to pass on.  Sony has a trade-in program running until September 1st that they will give you $450.00 for each Dell laptop (or $300 for other brands) you trade them in for a new Sony Laptop.  We traded in one dell and two IBMS and paid less than $450 per laptop for each one after the rebate, which included extended battery and docking station.

If you would like our Zones contact’s info let me know but here are the Sony details about the trade-in program http://www.sony.tradeups.com/Customers/12/AllPromotions.aspx

Sony ships with tons of bloat-ware and we did have some issues putting our volume XP and Vista licensing on these devices because of Sony driver issues but the second tier support was great in getting these issues resolved…. I wouldn’t change your entire lineup to Sony laptops, but if you have some old boat anchors laying around that you want to trade in this a great cost effective option.  If you do purchase a Sony viao and have support issues let me know and we’ll give you that contact info too.

Humongo Whiteboard on the Cheap

Our team continues to try to find better ways to work thru projects and prioritize the day to day projects in addition to the long term projects.   Our latest tool is a really high tech tool… or not.  Its a 12ft x 5 ft white dry erase board.  We rearranged Jim and Jeremie’s office and had a great space to hang the board… but then the price of a board this big was fairly steep…. well over $400 and some around $900.

Several people mentioned using bathroom wall board, but after while it doesn’t look good and starts to bow and sag and not erase.

Our Student ministries found some static cling clear plastic that works as a dry erase surface, but when you remove that paint starts to peel of… so it wasn’t worth the premium ($150+).  So the search continued until we found RustOleum Dry Erase Paint.  Two cans of this stuff cover a 14×7 ft area and only cost $40 at home depot.

So we picked up two cans and our awesome campus services team got to work putting on the first coat.  And after the 4th coat we posted a note not to write on the board until after 2 days… Next the Campus service guys put up some low profile molding to make a frame around the writing surface to keep Jeremie’s crazy drawings off the wall. And finally, a great surface for department planning!