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.

The first part of redesigning our site required that we think through what it would encompass and defining the requirements. We looked at a few things including:

1. Defining what we do well as a church.
2. Defining who we are.
   “ We are a grace-oriented, Bible church that seeks to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ”
3. Narrowing down our target audience / who we serve. (warning this is very generalized for the sake of simplicity”.

   ”We serve middle-aged families. The husband works at Rockwell and the wife is a stay-at-home mom with three children. They shop at Kohl’s, Target, and Hy-Vee. They live in Hiawatha or Cedar Rapids and their children are in the Linn-Mar or Cedar Rapids school district.:

4. Defining where we want to go. What’s the win?
   ”We want to have a web site that is accurate, up-to-date and is able to scale to serve the needs of our growing church family. It needs to accommodate the needs of multiple worship venues, our capital campaign and our building/relocation project. We want all event sign-up and payments to be done online.”

We then defined what the objectives would be for our team. These needed to be defined very clearly to enable us to stay on target.

i) We want to position ourselves for relocation and growth

ii) We want to provide self-service features that connect people to ministry and groups

iii) We want to provide accurate, up-to-date information that is easy to locate

iv) We want to minimize site maintenance

v) We want to reduce the clutter in order to maximize our impact – less is more

vi) We want our web site to be an extension of our brand/ministry

vii) We want the web site to be the primary place of communication and promotion

viii) We want the user of our web site to be in control of their online interaction/experience with the ability to push content to those who request it

We then looked at what was currently working for us on our current site. This included things like:

1. Streaming Media
2. Iconic home page promotions
3. Calendar
4. Unique design

We then defined what was not working on our current website, our current hurdles that were keeping us from completing the project – and how we would over come them – as well as our current assets we have to make the project a reality.

Up next: Creating a content map.

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.

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.