Two new interesting services were announced today.  I just want to make sure that you don’t miss them.

1. LifeChurch.tv released BabelWith.me today.  It simply lets you communicate with anyone, anywhere in up to 45 languages, automatically translating your conversation as you type. It’s built on Google App Engine and uses Google Translate, making it possible to enjoy real-time conversations with people around the globe, no matter what language they speak.
2. ACS released Check Point themes today.  This is great for churches with limited graphic design expertise.  You can install a simple program from ACS that allows you to change the theme of Check Point to any of the available options in their theme gallery.  It’s pretty cool - just beware… it overwrites your default.  So, if you’ve got a kick awesome design right now, be sure you have that graphic saved elsewhere.

We had our first ever ACS Users Podcast last week, and we talked about the upcoming integration with AccessACS and Facebook.  If you missed the call, you may listen to it online.  I apologize about the call quality.

Click for full-size screenshot

Apparantly cell phones don’t work perfectly in 19-story buildings in the middle of rain storms.  For future podcasts, I’ll make sure to use a land line.

During the call, we talked with Keith Thompson, a Senior Software Developer with ACS.  He outlined the upcoming integration with AccessACS and Facebook via an application that ACS is developing and will host on their servers.  They will allow churches to create their own semi-customized copy of this application.  They are releasing this as a free, value-added service to all clients who have purchased AccessACS.

Click for full-size screenshot

Some of the things this application will allow church members to do:

• View and update contact information with the church.  Changes will still go through the change request process
• Mark attendance for small groups
• View groups and rosters of all the groups they are involved with at church
• View upcoming events and activities
• View a church or group directory

This is exciting stuff, and you heard it first on the ACS Users Podcast!

I’m excited to announce that we’re going to have our FIRST ACS Users’ podcast, today (May 28) at 3pm Eastern / 2pm Central / Noon Pacific.

Our featured guests will include members of the ACS Research and Development team.

This will launch our monthly podcast, where you can call in and talk to others who are in the same boat as you.

To join the call, coming to you live from the annual ACS convention, simply dial in:
(724) 444-7444
Call ID: 19965
Enter 1# as your PIN

Or, connect via the Internet.

I led one of the seminars at the ACS Convention today (follow convention tweets) on successfully implementing AccessACS.

I was really excited about this class because it offered users a view of implementation from a fellow user’s perspective.  I shared our successes, our failures, our wants, our needs, our love for the product, and our love for the company.

I heard a lot of really positive feedback.  I’m glad that ACS allowed a little vulnerability in releasing their stage to me and creating a venue for real people to hear from other real people who use this stuff everyday.

If you’d like a copy of my class handouts, you can grab one here.

Friends, if you’re anything like me, you probably missed the news of one of the greatest advancements in the integration ACS Facility Scheduler and AccessACS.  For quite a while now, it has been possible to embed your Facility Scheduler published events (in list or grid view) to your Web site via a link in AccessACS.

They have now taken that integration even further.  You can embed individual calendars (ie: ministry area calendars) to your Web site via a link in AccessACS.  See our live example.

To accomplish this, you will first need to load Facility Scheduler.  Click the Admin tab, then Calendars.  You’ll need to go into each calendar you’d like to create embeddable links for and change the Published flag to be checked.

Once you have done this, the links will be created in AccessACS.  (Note: you will have to log-out and back in if you were logged into AccessACS while you made the changes in Facility Scheduler)  Go to Admin > Options and click on the Web Links tab and then the Calendar sub-tab.  You’ll see all the