Our staff voted last week to move forward with transitioning to ACS in 2008.  I’m excited and terrified at the same time.  The company seems uber-cool, and I know several of their staff will be reading this post within minutes of posting.  I believe the claims they make.  I don’t think they’re just blowing hot air or aiming only to get a sale.  I truly believe that ACS wants what’s best for our church, but I’m so scared that I’m wrong about that.

I’m also scared of the following:

1. We can’t afford a new server now, so we’ll be running Shelby (with full SQL), ACS, and several other things on the same physical machine with no virtualization.  That won’t change until at least spring.  That scares me.
2. They claim that Check Point will work with our Zebra printers, but I tested it and it didn’t.  Still, they say that absolutely they will make it work.  Still, I’m scared.
3. With data conversion, a lot of stuff doesn’t come over, namely attendance history.  Oh yeah, none of our vendors either.  That scares me too.
4. I’ve had so many nightmares with our current provider and our check scanners in the last few months, so I’m scared about this continuing with ACS, even though it’s definitely an unmerited fear.
5. Finally, I’m scared of how our staff will react when they need something from the database urgently but weren’t paying attention to the trainers when they talked about it.

Still through all of this, I’m already planning on some amazing benefits:

1. I won’t have to spend countless hours fixing something in our database that we pay someone else to fix (support contract).
2. I won’t have to worry about attendance numbers being wrong - you know, where you can count up 20 “P’s,” but the class total shows negative five people in attendance.
3. We will finally have a good Web integration solution, with a company who is all too happy to provide APIs if you want extra tweaking capabilities.
4. We get to fix our horrendous chart of accounts in GL.
5. We get to fix our horrendous Sunday School organizational structure.
6. We get to actually plan out what we want to do with our database and get training to back that up.
7. We get a check-in system that doesn’t require an extra 20 hours of work each week.
8. And, a check-in system that is actually secure (where crafty no-gooders cannot hope to reprint a receipt for a child)
9. We get support technicians who actually know what you’re talking about (allegedly)

So, my list of pros is much longer than my list of cons.  And, my list of cons really is just a list of fears… most of which are hopefully just that… fear.

More to come in future days.

(So, I haven’t written a blog post in 87 days. I’m a little rusty.)

For the 8 months that I have worked at my church, I have been pushing them to choose a new Church Management Software provider. We have been tremendously displeased with our current provider, especially in the last three weeks. With the release of their new version, they broke major pieces of attendance and check-in. In fact, attendance is so bad that the staff is actually ready to make a change. We had 1,100 in Sunday School last week, and our ChMS reported only 840. That’s way more than an acceptable margin of error. The REALLY funny part is that when we print out the entire database with P’s and A’s next to their name, the P’s add up to 1,100.

So, which provider do we go with? We’ve evaluated Fellowship One, Arena, and ACS. I posted previously about F1 and Arena, but I haven’t written about ACS. Dean Lisenby, ACS’ chief IT guru, had seen my afformentioned post and wrote me a message.

Just read your blog on Arena/F1. Just curious if you checked out ACS at all.
While I realize this may come across as a “sales” pitch. It’s really not. I’m
more interested in getting feedback on whether you checked us out or not. If
no, why not? if yes, then why? I’d love to chat if you could find time to
talk with me.

So, I talked to him. I called their main sales line and asked for Dean Lisenby, and they transferred me right to him. Major plus. Once I realized that he’s like an executive with ACS, I was even more impressed. So, we start talking about ACS, and I start seeing that this may actually be a good solution for us. So, I asked him to put me in touch with a sales guy. Most companies would give you a call or schedule a web demo - they sent 4 guys to our church. Another major plus.

I just got back today from Fellowship Bible Church in Dallas, after talking with their staff about ACS. They’ve used ACS for years. In fact, they actually left ACS for a while, went to F1, and came back to ACS.

I don’t have any meat for today, but maybe the Blackbaud guys will see this post and woo me to them. Just kidding Curt.  I’ll see you here again in another 87 days… hopefully sooner.

Continuing on my notes on sessions last week at the International Shelby Convention, today I’m writing about Kyle Brown’s session, “Preventative Maintenance: Tips to Keep your Server Serving You.” Kyle is the owner of Texas-based Innovative Data Solutions.

Some of the key tips Kyle provided in the session are:

• Proactive vs. Reactive. It’s more effective to do preventative maintenance in IT than to wait for things to break. If you take the time to prevent problems from happening, you won’t have to run around putting out fires. It’s less stressful, and cheaper.
• Tips on buying a new server. Kyle has several practical recommendations on buying a new server, all focus on redundancy. Make sure the server is equipped with RAID, dual power supplies, and a good UPS. He also suggests only buying new servers with good warranties, utilizing tape for nightly backups, enabling shadow copies on the volume, and using some sort of disaster recovery backup system.
• Routine Maintenance. Kyle suggests shutting down the server regularly, depending on amount of RAM, in order to fully clear the memory thus increasing system speed. His rule of thumb is for a server with 1 Gb of RAM to shut down every other week and for a server with 2 Gb of RAM to shut down once a month. He also suggests running a drive repair utility upon rebooting the server. (No word as to how often he suggest shutting down machines with more than 2 Gb).
• Software recommendations. Kyle made some recommendations for software utilities.
  1. File Recovery and Repair: OfficeRecovery, OfficeFix, and File Repair.
  2. Un-delete software and Solutions: Active Undelete, EasyRecovery, and WinUndelete.

Overall, a great session from a good man. Kyle seems to view his work as an IT consultant as his calling from God. I feel the same sort of conviction myself, and I’m sure that most of the readers of this blog do as well.

I’m curious what others think about the nightly tape backups. We’ve stopped using tape and are backing up to a NAS on the other side of the building. (I’m also doing off-site Shelby backups as well). Kyle admitted that he is somewhat obsessed about backing data up, and I’ve got to compliment him on that. Since most churches don’t have someone on staff to manage their network and data, they need a contractor who cares about their data just as much as they do.

Just a word of encouragement to churches who are looking for a good IT contractor, make a call to Kyle at IDS or Nick Nicholaou at MBS.

I suppose the secret’s out of the bag. I am trying to persuade my church to transition away from Shelby v5 as I am absolutely convinced that it is not currently serving us as it should. I don’t want to bash Shelby. They are a WONDERFUL company with some absolutely stellar employees. Still, there are some serious limitations in the software that force me to evaluate other options.

Today’s post is by no means an exhaustive evaluation of any Church Management System, but I do want to share some thoughts and discoveries that I have found about Shelby’s Arena and Fellowship One.

Fellowship One (http://www.fellowshiptech.com)		Arena (http://www.arenachms.com)
Originally developed by Fellowship Church Now a product of Fellowship Technologies Commercial launch: Jan. 2004 Over 550 customers		Originally developed by CCV Now a product of Shelby Systems Commercial launch: Aug. 2006 Around 20 customers
Key features Web based Hosted by Fellowship Easy to use and learn Toll-free phone support 6 am - 10 pm CST, 7 days Full CASS certification is in active development Check-in system works well with Terminal Services and thin clients Easy link between Web site and database through Weblink Robust contact management system to ensure that people don’t fall through the cracks. Report library contains thousands of reports, and they’ll create more if you need Many areas are customizable, but there are many hard-coded variables and sections Superior event management capabilities, intimately linked with check-in		Key features Web based Hosted by your church Easy to use and learn Toll-free phone support 7am - 6pm CST, 7 days Full CASS certification is not currently available Check-in system is not recommended for use with Terminal Services Built-in content management system for church Web site Detailed graph of real-time church involvement with fully customizable activity meter. Report library is robust, and you can build more with SQL reporting Application is fully customizable and ships with shared source code If transitioning from Shelby v5, an agent allows you to use v5 and Arena simultaneously
Price (based on TWA of 1,000, highest tier of service) First year: around $18,000 Subsequent years: around $1,000/month Price increases with higher attendance Price includes hosting and bandwidth Includes hardware (database servers) Includes unlimited SMTP (outgoing e-mails) SQL Server included		Price (only one option) First year: around $35,000 Subsequent years: around $1,000/month Price is fixed Price does not include hosting/bandwidth Does not include hardware (database server) Does not include SMTP (outgoing e-mails) Req. SQL Server 2005 (several thous. dollars)

So, what’s the bottom line?
Both systems are well built and production tested. I like the interface of both, and I’m hitting myself for not getting screenshots for you all. Part of the decision is a matter of preference. Where do you want your data? If you want it in-house, and you don’t want to develop your own system, Arena is your choice. You’ll have to have a full-time IT person, a rock-solid network, and some serious bandwidth if you’ll be using it for your church Web site. However, the data is completely within your control and you can do whatever you want with the source code. So, Arena is much more customizable -but- F1 is much more affordable as it includes the IT staff to support your database servers, the servers themselves, the bandwidth, and the secured location. If you’re cool with entrusting your data with someone else, F1 is a great choice.

Currently, F1 has more features. It’s a more robust solution, but it is older than Arena. It’s been around a little longer. My verdict for our church is that without a contact managment system, the inability to connect with check-in through terminal services, the extra steps in approving volunteers, the state of CASS certification, and a few other limitations that Arena is simply not worth the extra cost for us. Also, I’m not too keen on being a pioneer for Shelby’s new venture. I’d rather give them a few years with it to see if they make it better or worse than it is currently.

Your thoughts?

(Thanks to Brett for inspiring this post today.)

One of the most frustrating parts of working with Shelby for me is the lack of options in Selections and Listings. There are so many times that I need information in a report that comes from a different module than the one I am in, and S&L just doesn’t give me the option to include that information. Or, it does have the ability but it’ll just take you 20-minutes to figure out how to get it.

So, in comes ShelbyQUERY. With this, I can run SQL statements on my database, using this helpful tool. It is over the heads of most of our people, and there is a definite learning curve. I have a slight advantage because I’ve done so much web programming using MySQL.

I thought it was so funny that the presenter of this session talked about how the user interface is so much more intuitive in this module than in the rest of Shelby. He’s right - the UI is easier to use and more intuitive here. The real funny part to me was in finding out that Shelby didn’t actually program this module - they license it from another company.

Here are a few helpful pieces of information when using ShelbyQUERY. When filtering data through the module, the wildcard is not an asterisk (*) like in the rest of the software. You can’t filter the Smith’s by using Sm*, instead the wildcard in QUERY is the percent sign (%). So, to filter the Smith’s, use Sm%.

Also when filtering, the question mark (?) is no good, instead it must be substituted with an underscore (_).

Finally, here’s some helpful information in understanding Shelby’s tables. For instance, GlobaFile information is not found in the “GF” table, it’s found in the “NA” table. Here’s the list:

Happy query’ing to you all!