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!
Facility Scheduler Update-Separate Links
ACS released the latest update to Facility Scheduler and AccessACS last night. Probably one of the more notable new features (for me, anyway) is the ability to publish individual calendars as well as events. This can go a long way toward a single calendar solution for ministry.
Previously, each event had a check box that allowed it to be visible “to the free world” instead of just “AccessACS members”. AccessACS would provide an HTML link to your public calendar, which you would then add to your website, link to, put into a widget, etc. All published events would be displayed via this link. This is also where Broadcast and the .mobi apps would pull their information from.
Check out Matthew Irvine’s post on Broadcast. This is hot. (While you are at it, add his feed to your list.)
If you were logged into AccessACS as a member, you could see all the events on all the calendars. Published or not.
This was good. The new segregation is great.
Let me explain:
We have five calendars: Main Church Calendar, Preschool Calendar, Elementary School Calendar, Special Events, and the Staff and Vacation Planning Calendar.
Obviously, I don’t want my vacation to be a published event on the church website for the free world to see. But it might be nice for the members to know when I am out of the office for an extended period. Previously I would just select not to publish that event. The only people who could then see it were members and only if they were logged into AccessACS. That was useful for them. For segregating viewing ability from “free world” to “members only” this worked well.
One of the drawbacks was that there was only one calendar link created by AccessACS. Which means a published event is a published event is a published event. Church, school, staff, you name it.
The new upgrade gives you the following:
1. AccessACS creates a separate HTML link for published events for every calendar.
- We still have the aggregated “Public Calendar” that includes ALL published events from ALL calendars.
- The church can now publish a cleaner public calendar as it will only have published church events.
- Elementary School can have a “Public” calendar of their own to put on their website, widget, etc as well as a “private” calendar with other events that the parents must log into AccessACS to see.
2. You can now also select which calendars are displayed within AccessACS for view by members. 
Note the absence of the “Staff and Vacation Planning Calendar”.
Suppose the staff has an internal calendar that we wish to limit the view to only staff members. Maybe an equipment maintenance calendar. I certainly wouldn’t want someone going up to our maintenance staff on Sunday morning and asking if he got the oil changed on the bus this week. This allows for that.
You would have to be logged into the Facility Scheduler thin client to see it. I can even drill down further and create a role that would allow certain individuals access to certain calendars only.
This enhancement is really going to be quite useful. It always seems like the simplest things have the greatest impact (think:ball point pen).
There is another enhancement just on the AccessACS side which, if it works like I think it does, will make our Volunteer Coordinator and some key Lay Leaders so happy they will be hard to live with.
Can’t wait to try it out.
