I’m excited to see that ACS is now employing people to focus on software architecture. Due to a number of circumstances, they ended up with about 7 different unconnected calendars across their various products. Now, with the help of architects like Jamey, they are working to integrate their products more and more.

While all the pieces aren’t there, the future is bright, just looking from the calendaring perspective alone, here are some of the ideas that we’re looking to employ in our church.

• Integrating Facility Scheduler (FS) with an EMS to control HVAC systems. This reduces energy consumption and personnel costs!
• Integrating FS with our alarm system to arm and disarm the building on a schedule
• Integrating FS with our door locks to lock and unlock doors on a schedule
• Integrating FS with digital signage around the campus to display coming events
• Integrating FS with LCD screens by the doors of rooms to display what’s happening in that room
• Integrating FS with our Web site to display upcoming events
• Integrating FS with Outlook (where our users spend most of their time) to display calendar events
• Integrating FS with services like Upcoming.org to publicize events

All of these things work to reduce operational and personnel costs, which translates directly to more money ending up in missions and ministries.

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.

So, a while back Jason posted a tool for dealing with Outlook’s NK2 files. The tool is called NK2.info, imaginitively named after its Web site. As a brief briefing, the NK2 file is the file that contains Outlook’s address autocomplete data (when you start typing in the to box, these are the addresses that are in the drop down).

Jason’s reasons for needing the tool are a little different than mine though. See, every so often, one of my user’s NK2 files gets corrupted. It’s only happened twice since I’ve been working here, but it turns out to be a somewhat common problem with others as well. Deleting the user’s NK2 file is fine to do - Outlook will rebuild the file when it starts up again. However, all their autocomplete addresses are gone then.

Well, short of buying Ingressor’s $35 software, there’s not much you can do to recover the file so that your user won’t be impeded by his inability to remember addresses.

Jason’s tool is good for creating a CSV file out of the NK2 data, but I found one that I like a lot better. Now, it won’t do anything to fix a corrupted file, but it will capture the addresses and save them in a tab-delimited text file or HTML file for you to do something with. The tool, again with an imaginative name, is NK2View. It seems to do a better job of getting human-readable names out of the NK2 file, and it also is a bit more user-friendly. At least, it was more friendly to this user.

Here’s a screenshot: