Wishing for More
I’m piggybacking on Jason Lee’s recent post by the same name. We too use products from ACS Technologies as our ChMS. Like Jason, we consider ourselves ministry partners with ACS. We’re not just customers and they’re not just a vendor. We both seek to better the other, and we love the relationship that we’ve built with them. I’m especially thankful for Dean Lisenby and Rebekah Gibbs going the extra mile for us. I hope that I also can go the extra mile for you.
Facility Management - Jason spoke of their involvement with the Facility Scheduler product, and while it is so far from where I want it to be, I am seeing the great power and potential of the product. On a recent call with Darci Shelly, she said she would be happy to provide us a .NET API for the product as soon as they finish documentation on it. This will allow us to have the ultimate level of customization and integration. Bravo ACS - this is an enormous step in the right direction.
Outlook Integration - I hear good things about the Add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2007 (I haven’t used it), but my understanding is that it is not possible to populate CC or BCC with a group of people from an individual Sunday School class through the add-in. That’s the kind of integration that would make users do what they should. I posted my frustration on Twitter yesterday about this: my users won’t use the ChMS to look up an address every time they send an e-mail, nor do they typically pass on new e-mails from congregants. So then, we end up with 50 different databases, all with different information and frustrated congregants who just want their information to be update with the church one time.
Web Services - I love the work (and documentation) that ACS has already done on Web Services for AccessACS. This lets you get at your data and use it how you want. You’re not restrained by the UI. However, I would really REALLY like to see some code examples from PHP or Perl. The truth of the matter is that most Web sites are hosted on Linux/Unix servers now. Most of the good open-source content management systems are written in PHP, and it’d be great to have a base to pull from. While that’s not really ACS’ job, it’d be great to have.
Check-in - There are a TON of changes that we have requested for Checkpoint. It’s good software, but it really is a square-peg to square-hole utility. You use it their way or you don’t use it. In other words, there aren’t a lot of configuration options. So, Rebekah has been way more than gracious to hear our needs and has promised to have a lot of those changes in the new version of the software. This will be good for all clients who use Checkpoint as the changes will allow for more control of the process.
I wouldn’t trade ACS for anything right now. They did make me quite grumpy last week when we discovered some things with contribution statements, but I’ll talk about that later. As always, I am so thankful that ACS cares about the Gospel more than they care about the bottom line, and I’m thankful they care about our ministry to Belton, Texas more than they care about our business.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Lets connect to discuss all of this more next week.