Cause to Pause

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.

I saw this post from Christopher Dawsonover at ZDNET:

“Just a brief rant here, folks…I talked a while ago about my superintendent and how he used AOL extensively for calendaring and communication. Basically, I came to the conclusion that if we don’t provide users with a range of tools to satisfy their needs, they’ll bring crappy ones on-site that we’ll need to support (like AOL).”

Now there is a little bit of wisdom! One of the challenges we face in church data is “silos of information”. People maintaining their Excel sheets, Outlook contact lists, etc outside of the main database. This became a topic of discussion at the FL.CITRT during the session on IT Strategy.

One of the axioms I picked up over 10 years ago from Calvary Chapel, Ft. Lauderdale was that their entire method of ministry had been boiled down to:
“Find a need and fill it.”

The same applies to internal tools: listen to needs, prove the tools, maintain ongoing dialog, be willing to set aside pride and the “I am right, you WILL do it MY way” type of thinking.

It is either that or fractured ministry, silos of information, frustrated staff on both sides and burned out volunteers.

Sunday we held a class for new elders on the finer points of AccessACS, our member log-in section. They obviously knew how to log in and use it for their purposes, but the goal was to help them understand how mainintaing their own groups/committee lists would improve the flow of communication overall. Once they realized the changes they were allowed to make would all need to be approved by a staff admin, they had confidence to “get their feet wet”.

It was really quite rewarding on a number of levels:
1. All I did was “provide backup”. A volunteer elder actually led the training and walked people through the processes. Talk about equipping members!
2. Watching the one person who came into the class as the most timid “non-computer person”, take hold of the tools, filters, etc. and add events to the calendar, add people to their groups, look for information, etc. (BTW-This was also the lone mac user. There’s one in every crowd).

By doing it this way, the person leading the class had confidence, because there was someone there to fall back on, the people learning it were free to try anything because they found out I would delete the changes anyway. Fly little birdies, fly!

The funny thing is, at the end of it, they were so excited because “this will save us so much time because we won’t have to bother the staff so much.”

Preach it, sister, preach it.