ACS Responds
After my post about dropping a bomb on ACS, I have been able to do some serious dialogue with people in power at ACS about the issues that I covered. I wanted to update you about some of the progress and some of the dialogue about these issues.
- William (AccessACS program manager) e-mailed me today about the ability to pass people to specific URLs within AccessACS.
We are also reviewing the ability to pass in URLs. We have ran into some security snags and that is my biggest concern, but we are looking at ways to allow you to pass in urls to certain areas that members would have high traffic to such as Serving, Small Groups, My Dashboard, and Personal Preferences. As we make more progress I’ll keep you up to date. No promises on if it will be a part of the upcoming release, but I did want to share were we are at.
- Darci (Facility Scheduler program manager) and I have e-mailed back and forth several times and spoke on the phone for about 20 minutes yesterday. She and I are looking at some of the log-in issues with AccessACS and Facility Scheduler. Since they’re on a unified log-in now, she’s the one in the know on all things related to log-in. Some of the problems we talked about are:
- Making the temporary passwords easier (not containing special characters) so that the golden generation doesn’t have to call me for assistance
- Making the password reset process easier (currently five steps to reset password, 2 more to change it to something else)
- Making it easier to retrieve a lost user name (either with a link or with a note on screen)
- Changing the screen for initial password reset to not look like an error (with red words showing up)
- Working out a system to notify an administrator when a scheduled upload fails
As always, I have been very impressed by ACS’ willingness to listen and make changes. My main goal is to reduce the number of support calls that I have to handle. The value of the program (AccessACS) diminishes greatly when it takes such a large portion of my time to provide support for it. It’s a great product. Don’t misunderstand.
My only goal is to use my vision as an end-user to provide meaningful feedback to ACS about how the product can be improved. If they make some simple changes, they serve me better… both by reducing the number of support calls that I handle and by increasing the usage of the product in our church. Increasing the use of the product directly results in saving time for all of our staff members.
So, if you’re on the fence about adding AccessACS to your suite of ACS products, let this post be an encouragement to you. When there are issues, ACS listens and responds. They have a living product in active development, and they care about your ministry. We are happy with AccessACS, and we’re glad it’s part of our church software.
