Shameless Plug Friday 7-10-09
- Derek Berg has left the building. Or more accurately the state. He, his wife and the team from Woodland have left for Ariz. and New Mexico on a mission trip. You can follow their trip from this official blog on the church website.Or DM @djberg and he may let you follow him via Google Latitude.
- Jason Lee and his dogged determination. Jason is not letting up on the idea of having his whole ACS member database in his MS Exchange Active Directory. Here’s a post on it. Here’s another one. This Monday Jason is setting up a conference call to discuss the possibility as well as what it would take to make it happen. Details can be found on his blog here.
- My other buddy Jason (this time Reynolds) for getting me into a group ride last Saturday. Turnabout is fair play, my friend…
- Lastly Jason Powell, or more accurately, his son Jacob who took a header out of a bunk bed at camp. Broke his wrist, got stitches and went right back to camp. Trooper!
PS. Anyone else feel like Larry from the old Bob Newhart show? “This is my brother, Darryl. And my other brother, Darryl.”
Membership data meets Outlook
This is my Outlook address book: 
This is my Outlook address book four minutes later:
Any Questions?
Couple of points of clarification:
- Yes, the time stamps are real. It took about a minute to sync, and three minutes for me to save the first capture and reload the snipping tool
- Columns are resized and whited out to protect the innocent
- Note the size of the slider bar. 1600 member names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses imported in about a minute
- Windows 7 compatible (XP and Vista as well).
- All the normal view options in Outlook are available
So, what is this? It’s an Outlook(2007) plug-in that goes to AccessACS, grabs your data, and imports it. It creates an additional contact folder much like hotmail.com does if you use the Outlook connector. The official post from ACS Technologies is here.
Notice the miniature icon in the tool bar? That is your sync button. Everything is “One-way” so no one can change records in their Outlook and mess up your data. You cannot (at least I could not) create a distribution list from this contact list. You can add categories and filter that way, but the next time you synch, they will be overwritten. To interact with a group, your best bet is still the web login. However, you now have your member database in Outlook. Which is where our people work. This makes it SO easy to look up a member address, email, telephone, etc.
AND it is linked to an indvidual’s AccessACS login. So, this can go out to the whole staff (technically your members too, but you will have to support them).
The beauty? A member changes their personal info, church office does an upload, you sync your Outlook. All addresses are the same. There is now no reason for staff to maintain email addresses of members in their Outlook “silo”. Beauty.
No logging into ACSW or even into AccessACS or your self-branded version of it. In our case www.pinkpres.me.
I as well as members of our staff have been using the beta “look-up only” version for about a year. In fact, it was that original beta version that finally got our technologically challenged Sr. Pastor to handle his own email. No more printing it out and him dictating a response. This tool alone probably saved a dozen trees and at least one secretary from a nervous breakdown.
Member data within Outlook really is that handy. I personally had three instances yesterday where I had to respond to an email but needed to include a third and fourth party in the conversation. This tool made everything possible from right where I was.
Too bad it doesn’t work on the calendar…
But wait, there’s more!
ACS Technologies: Home
This is probably going to be an “ACS week” since there are two major developments coming out of Florence.
One is their newly redesigned website, launched last night. It is built and hosted on their “Extend Platform” CMS and it looks to me like they fashioned it in a “multi-site church” sort of way.
Instead of multiple campuses and then multiple ministries, they divided the product lines into Mega(Enterprise), Medium/Large(Foundational), Small(Membership Plus), etc. and under each one of those are the different product lines as applicable. By playing with the URL a bit, especially between the Mega and Med/Large you can see how this pans out. Also helps a lot with the navigation.
They did a nice job of taking the focus off the company and putting it on the user. Do our church websites do that? Is the focus on us as a church or is the focus on the person in front of the screen?
Disclaimer: For those who think I say “all nice things all the time” about ACS, Dad said “If you have something good to say about someone, tell others. If you have something bad to say, deal with just that person or shut up.” Dad was a man of brevity. I don’t always live up to Dad’s words, but I do try.
This is the minor announcement. The major one? Stay tuned..
