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!

MinistryTech Colorado Springs Hotel ~$55 per night

Well there are just 34 days until MinistryTech 2009 in Colorado springs!  If you haven’t registered what are you waiting for?  If the 40% discount on the conference registration wasn’t enough to make attending a reality for you I have some more good news.

The Hampton Inn in Colorado Springs has agreed to give us a rate of $59 per night or even $55 per night if you pre-pay your stay. This rate is for the Church IT Roundtable and will be available until April 1st.  To book a room at this rate you must call the hotel directly and mention “Woodman Valley IT Group”.  We can’t guarantee availability at this rate, but the hotel will offer this rate to as many guests as possible until the deadline or the hotel is full, so don’t delay call them ASAP!  If you have already made reservations at the Hampton please call and move your reservation to “Woodman Valley IT Group” to get the discounted rate.

Hampton Inn Colorado Springs 1-25 North
7245 Commerce Center Dr., Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA 80919
Tel: +1-719-593-9700
$55 per night when you mention “Woodman Valley IT Group”

****UPDATED 3/26/09**** DISCOUNT OFFER EXPIRES 4/1/09

The Hampton Inn also offers FREE WiFi (bandwidth is a commercial T1 incase you were wondering) as well as free hot breakfast each morning.

If you plan to stay with us at the Hampton Inn leave a comment below so we have an idea of who all will be at the hotel.  Also leave a comment if you want to share rental car, or need to share a rental car with someone and we’ll try to help make those connections.

Airfare rates are dropping out of the sky, we booked our roundtrip tickets for $150 per person from Chicago Midway to Denver… so this trip is affordable even when travel budgets are small!

Join your peers from churches from across the country for this unique peer learning and sharing event!

See you in the Springs!

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!

Apple Help file says “From a Windows machine…”

We recently updated our Communications Director’s machine to Leopard (yes almost a year after it came out because of various reasons).  This upgrade included moving him to Office 2008 and Entourage 2008.

I have said since Office 2008 came out that I didn’t care for Entourage, and wondered why it was so difficult for MS to create a Mac version of outlook that functioned the same way… Entourage just doesn’t.

One of the funniest parts of this migration was when Kirt called me to explain he wasn’t able to accept or decline events in Entourage, the buttons were there by grayed out.  He could login to his virtual XP machine and Outlook worked without any issue but no dice for Entourage.  Then Kirt reported he found in the online knowledge base the following:

Cause:  When you receive an invitation in an Entourage account that is synchronized with an Exchange account running on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Exchange adds a tentative event to the Calendar.   

Solution:  Change your preferences for the Calendar in Outlook Web Access. From a Windows-based computer, log in to Outlook Web Access, and then click Options in the upper right corner of the screen.”

What you can’t control the settings from Entourage but you have to login to a PC?  And not just login to a PC but in to OWA how crazy.

Long story short the problem wasn’t the above issue, as funny as the solution may be, but a known bug in Entourage.  If you have someone in the organization selected as a delegate Entourage assumes you don’t want the ability to accept or decline meeting requests.  By changing the delegate to just a Calendar Editor then the Accept/Deny buttons function properly.