Where we’re at

In July we moved our staff at New Covenant out to our new church facility. As part of the transition we moved to Switchvox as our phone system. Our goal for the initial implementation was to not cause much of a disruption to our staff and their workflow- meaning we were only going to implement the features our previous Telrad PBX had to offer as we already had enough on our plate going from 40 hand sets to 110 handsets.

Starting the following week we started rolling out other additional features the system had natively – including voicemail to email, some custom dial plans, as well as the website user interface. We also worked to get Arena click to call integration working as well as importing call detail records into our Arena database. This is working great for us.

Here are some additional thoughts I have on the process:

• I am still in awe how easy Switchvox is to customize to meet your needs. If you can think through a scenario you would want a phone system to do you can probably implement it fairly easily and quick with Switchvox
• Version 5 being so new is very stable. Its working great for us.
• We love our Polycom handsets. (we are using the IP650, IP670, and IP335 handsets). The voice quality is amazing – we have never heard better on a pone and our staff love it.
• Have the integration complete to Arena is really great! Being able to look up a member record and having access to see who they talked to recently and which staff they have had interactions with adds a ton of value!
• Our front office / reception staff seem to be adjusting well and liking the ability to use the computer interface to transfer calls instead of just using their key pad.
• DID’s are a real win. If your church is not using them yet you are missing out. There is no reason someone should always have to go trough your receptionist with the combination of both DIDs and caller ID.

We still have some additional features to roll out to our staff such as the iPhone application, and giving them more training on the website interface but so far the system has been a real hit for us.

This project really would not have been successful with out the help of some great people on our team including:

• Ben & David for taking the lead on setting up and unboxing all of the handsets in a  matter of a few days as well as putting them all on the correct desk and helping with the provisioning.
• Adam for his help with getting the network infrastructure and switch programing done correcting to handle vlans, and class of service- as well as his help with setting up our PRI.
• Jon and David from Voracity Solutions helping us with the Arena integration.
• Tom and the team at Higher Grounds for proving the system as well as their guidance and expertise with the initial configuration and support.
• Many volunteers who gave part of there days to help us roll this out to our staff.

On another note- if any one wants to purchase any old Telrad parts or the entire system drop me a line.

I have been hearing a lot of complaints about the new final cut pro x software – I think the best one is this video. If I was in the software industry I would not want my product advertised like this.

Our team has been working hard on getting the print, web and video pieces done for our Mission Expansion projection that launched last Sunday complete. We decided to create a couple video pieces to help with the introduction. These videos were both shown in our Sunday services.

Mission Expansion Introduction:

Embracing Faith 3 Campaign Promo from New Covenant Bible Church on Vimeo.

Betsy’s Story:

Betsy’s Story from New Covenant Bible Church on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy the videos. They were produced and edited by Andrew Male, from our staff team.

New Covenant will be implementing a new phone system in the coming months as we move to our new campus. After meeting with a variety of different vendors we narrowed our search down to Asterisk/Switchvox and Shortel.

I am confident that either solution would have worked well for us- but we did end up choosing Switchvox as it looks to have a lower cost of ownership and a bit less up front costs.

We are excited to implement this new system. Some of the key features we are looking forward to include:

1. Integration of call detail records and click to call into our Arena ChMS system.

2. Implementation of DIDs to get calls directly to our offices.

3. Ease of use – as we are moving from a digital system to an IP system.

We are moving from around 40 phones to a 120 phones at our new campus.

If you have not had a chance to look at Switchvox and you are implementing a new phone system I would recommend you take a look.

There are some very important tools that I use on a day to day basis in my role at New Covenant. With out these tools my day would be extremely different. Each one has changed the way I work over the past couple of years.

• Evernote: Ever note is my digital reference file cabinet. This I use this to file articles, documentation, database scripts, and anything else that is reference.
• Microsoft OneNote: I use OneNote to track projects, action items and information on various staff that I work closely with on a day to day basis, projects I am currently working on, and agendas and notes from meetings.
• ClearContext: Clear Context is a great Outlook add-on that helps manage your inbox. It helps to create rules, turn emails into meetings and tasks quickly, as well as helps keep your inbox files organized.
• Dream Weaver: I use this to mark up the html files for our website before its posted into our content manager. Its much easier than using the editor that is built in.
• Microsoft Outlook: Outlook is one of those tools that I can not imagine getting rid of. Its so central to my day to day work – managing emails, calendar and tasks for me. I have tried Google App and Apple Mail but nothing really compares with using Outlook.
• Snagit: Snagit and a screen capture tool that makes it very easy to ftp screen shots, email them, or save them. Its probably one of my favorite tools in doing documentation.

If your church uses the Arena ChMS system, and you use Outlook 2007 or 2010 I would highly recommend you check out the new Outlook Plug-in Voracity Solutions has developed for Arena.

In short the Outlook Plug-in allows you to extend your Membership System to Outlook. It allows you to have access to your church management software database right from Outlook. It also allows you to quickly turn an email into a phone conversation, making the communication more personal.

We have been using it at New Covenant and it has been a real win for us. Here is a quick screen shot of it.

Take a look!

A few months ago our Missions team was looking for a simple way to send updates to those going on one of our short-term trips. They wanted to remind the individual of their total cost, as well as the amount they have yet to raise. We also wanted to equip the team members to be able to communicate with their supporters.

We were already using the Missions Trip functionality in the Arena ChMS system, so we already had the data all collected in one system. We choose to develop some specifications, and contract the project out to Voracity Solutions.

The project went very well and we now have an automated weekly email that is sent out to the participants of all active mission trips. Below is a screen shot of the actual email.

If you are using Arena ChMS, I would encourage you to look at using the mission trip modules. 

I always like to start the new year reflecting on the previous year and then getting excited about what is going to come in the next. 2011 looks quite exciting!

2010 was very exciting, many things happened including:

• Continued to work towards my degree in Management Information Systems.
• Continued to work along side the staff team at New Covenant in many ways.
• Developed a regular exercise routine.
• Purchased my first home.

In the next year I look forward to the a few things on the horizon-

• Working with the NCBC Leadership team to help facilitate the relocation to our new facility.
• Developing teams of volunteers to help guide and lead our IT team at New Covenant.
• Developing a personal healthy eating diet.
• Developing a plan to read the bible regularly and getting involved in a small group.
• Graduating with my bachelors degree.

How was your year- and what are you looking forward to in 2011?

One of the things we worked hard on when developing content for the New Covenant Bible Church website last spring was to make sure our content was all able to be understood by guests and people not in the “church world”.

We avoided calling things by the names they are called internally and used names that people in the community would understand. This video / commercial from Dun kin’ Donuts really helps bring value to this concept.

At New Covenant we have just a few mac users, but we have always had a hard time closely integrating them with our Microsoft Exchange environment. It has always “worked” but has been missing features such as notes and tasks being able to sync back from Entourage (or the various Apple products) and Exchange.

As soon as Office 2011 for Mac became available we started testing it. Office for Mac now includes Outlook (yes Outlook and not Entourage) – the Mac is now for the most part a first class citizen on the Exchange server. Our Mac users have liked the ability to have their email, notes, tasks, calendar, etc all in one place. This has been a real win for us.