Where we’re at

We have been talking about implementing Microsoft Office Communications Server at New Covenant for the past few years – but it has always been on the back burner.

A few weeks ago one of our volunteers decided to take the lead on the project and begin the process of implementing it. It did not take him long to set it up- really just a few hours after building a new virtual machine for it.

Currently we are only using it as an internal instant messaging application – but plan to integrate it into our phone system, federate it with other instant messaging providers such as AIM, MSN and Yahoo, as well as use it as a "free/busy" board to know which staff are available in the office, etc.

Overall being a 501c3 the implementation price of this application (the CALs, software, and maintenance agreements) was rather low- and the potential benefits far outweigh the costs.

If you are running Active Directory, with any version of Exchange and are looking for a Communications platform – I would encourage you to look into OCS.

Wow! The year went fast. I cannot belive 2009 is gone already and we are almost a month in to 2010!

The past few months have been super busy for us at NCBC. We are in the middle of many projects and are making great headway. As I look a head to 2010 I see the following projects that are a priority for our ministries.

1. Finish our new church website powered by the Arena ChMS system and designed by Voracity Solutions. We are excited to be able to offer our church online giving, event registrations, and an over all richer website experience. I cannot wait to be able to share more about our process with Voracity, and how it is working after we launch! If you an Arena customer and have not yet made a external website based on their system – you are missing out!

2. Work on our finalizing many different processes at NCBC. We have been working hard at documenting how we do things that make NCBC unique such as our First Time Guest Process & Following up, our Communications Work Flow for promoting and request events, as well as how we handle new Attenders in our database and members.

3. Work on our budget. We are about ready to start having meetings to discuss our budget proposals. This is one aspect of my job that really gets me going! I love planning and budgeting. This processes allows me to see what our different ministries are dreaming for the upcoming year and gives me the knowledge neccessary to think about how we can support them with IT & Communications initiatives.

4. Metrics – or better known as data mining. Drawing conclusions and tracking information in our database and giving our leadership monthly reports on some specific statistics such as the number of people serving, average contribution, number of contributors, etc – and working to automate this in the Arena system.

5. New Facility Planning- Back in October ( I think) our church voted to start construction of our new facility about 10 minutes a way from our current one. This is not just an addition of a building – we will be completely re-locating and selling our current facility. We have started to plan and research phone systems, infrastructure, and many other things as well as assembling bids from companies.

Overall I am excited about the challenges that lie a head for the next year and cannot wait to see what God will accomplish.

Here at New Covenant we had the privilege of beta testing Voracity Solutions new Mobile Membership software for the ArenaChMS product.

Mobile Membership is an enhancement to the current Arena Mobile Modules and is a great add-on to Arena for any church that would like to take there database with them on there cell phone.

We worked with Voracity to make sure the modules would all work properly on Windows Mobile devices, as well as iPhone and Palm devices.

Voracity has made the system very easy to update – by using their Control Panel to perform the initial install, as well as all future updates. The Control Panel detects what version of Arena you are using and makes sure Mobile Membership is updated to work it.

You can learn more about Voracity Solutions as well as there Mobile Membership product by visiting there website- www.voracitysolutions.com

One of the tools I rely on often is Xmarks. Xmarks allows me to sync my favorites between Internet Explorer and Firefox as well as my Firefox passwords between computers.

It is great to be able to have a page open in the office at work when I leave the office for the day, and when I return home open the browser on my home computer and have it open in the same spot.

I never have to worry about not having a saved password to favorite as well.

If you currently do not have a tool to sync favorites between browsers and computers as well as passwords you might give Xmarks a shot.

We have long since been Dell customers. We actually have over 70 Dell computers on our campus.

We made a rather large Dell order last month and would have placed in on our Dell Business Credit Account like usual. We have never had a problem with this account in the past- but our sales rep recommended we switch to a Dell Financial Services account.

We have always had a great relationship with our Dell rep- we we did it and all went well. They even called us to ask if we made the order- which made me very comfortable knowing that some one was looking out for us.

Then the bill came. We cut a check- and paid it in full like usual. For some reason Dell received the check one day late. This caused us to be charged an interest fee.

Generally we would call Dell and tell them what day we sent it- and they would like at our prior experiences and wave the interest fee. (on our old account)

They were not willing to budge this time around. They removed a bit less than 1/2 the interest fee.

And that is where it currently stands. We have had a case open for a bit over a week now and have not heard much.

Am I disappointed with our account rep- nope. She does a good job and always has.

Am I disappointed with Dell Financial Services- yes. We will be closing the newly opened account once we have pay our last bill that came.

This is one area in which Dell could improve.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about lately is how we are tracking people by member status is our database.

We use the following member statuses:

Member: Active Voting – anyone who has taken our membership class and actively attends a worship service and / or is actively giving.

Member: Inactive Voting – anyone who has gone to membership class and is no longer meats the criteria above. (to the best of our knowledge)

Attender: – any one who actively attends a worship service.

Guest: Any one who has visited with us for a worship service on a Sunday and has filled out a communication card to let us know they came.

Non-Attender / Misc: Any one who is involved in a small group, Adult Bible Fellowship, attends an event, or is a parent of a child in our youth ministries and children’s ministries.

Minor: Any one under 18.

The problem we have is that we cannot tell the difference between some one who never attends our church and some one who is actively involved in a Small Group / ABF but just does not attend a worship service.

After talking with our “Database Queen” this last week- we are looking at making yet another membership status for this group of people as we find it is important to know the difference.

Does any one else have thoughts on this? Or a membership status name we can borrow?

UPDATE (6/3/2008)

A couple of people have asked how we gather the information we have talked about above. For worship service attendance- the only real way we know who is attending vs. who is not is if they fill out a “communication card” that is provided for them in their bulletin- or if they are giving. We have created a report that tells us who has given by particular services. When we process contributions into Arena we do a batch per service. The only loop hole currently in this process is any one who has given with ACH or Electronic Fund Transfer- as they are likely to get marked present for one of our five services.

We are also tracking many other activities which would allow you to be included in our Attendee Member Status- such as Youth Group Attendance, Adult Bible Fellowship Attendance, where and how often members are serving, as well as what events they have been going to and which ones they have registered for – but have not attended.

We have been trying to get online giving going for about six months now. We were recommended by one of our venders to use PDS / Money Gram as our provide since they had a partnership with them.

We tried this.

I am disappointed in the quality of service they have offered.

We have frequently called PDS / Money Gram and left voice mails- none of which have been returned.

We have received emails from the company- in which we have responded to them and then have also asked for some one to call us and follow up. This has not happened.

I would not the use of these two companies to any church or other organization. It looks good on paper- but you most likely will be disappointed.

This post is not meant to come down and accuse money gram or PDS of any wrong doing or anything- maybe we were just not a great fit for their company.

We will now begin to look at using another company to handle processing our online giving.

On Saturday we started our migration to Exchange 2007. So far everything is going well.

I have moved my mailbox over and have been enjoying the many new features of OWA.

I am now under the impression that we could almost uninstall Outlook from all of our client PCs and they could use OWA instead. I have yet to find a core feature it is missing.

This next week we plan to figure out what our certificate from GoDaddy is not “certified / trusted” for all browsers. I have a bad feeling we will need to get a different certificate. (what are others doing?)

We also plan to finalize out installation of ISA 2006 and switch away from 2004. This will allow us to publish our Exchange sever a bit differently and allow Outlook Any Where usage for our mobile users.

We also plan to look into switching away from Good Messaging for our Windows Mobile users and start using the built in active sync component.

I am excited to see the new possibilities we will have.

I am generally pretty good at trying new things. One of the things I have been staying away from trying over the last couple years was the Mac operating systems. I am very comfortable with the Windows system- so why learn Mac?

When I started at NCBC we had one Mac- and that use basically supported them self- and still does to this day.

We have never had a problem with the Mac- accept it does not like to print to printers with out post script. (We have a Lanier 232c- and we did not purchase post script for it- so it will not print in color)

It just so happened that one of our three Macs freed up last week- which gave me the ability to try to use one for a week or so.

The only frustration I have had so far is that I cannot use Fusion and run Windows since I am using a PowerBook G4 – with Leopard OS installed.

This should be an interesting experience- and I will try to blog along the way on what I learn.

We had been evaluating Wyse (www.wyse) terminals for use with our Arena check-in system. We ordered our first Wyse about three weeks ago and set it up, got it added into our domain, and added the .NET framework 2.0 which was required for the check-in application.

We had a few issues in the process in which we decided to contact Wyse support. Within doing this we realized that the Wyse technical support was not very helpful, and we proceded to try and return the unit since we did a thirty day evaluation.

We were under the impression like any Dell product (we setup the evaluation through Dell) that we would be able to return it and the company would pay the shipping. Our assumption was wrong and we will end up paying to ship it back, with out our questions answered.

After reading some other blogs (http://netplumber.blogspot.com/2008/03/arena-check-in-stations.html) we will now test the HP clients to see if we make any further progress- as it looks like it has been working out well for Church of the Resurrection.