Cause to Pause

1. First and foremost, our veterans. Everyone who has served, supported or lost someone who served our country. Thank you.
2. This post by Michael Hyatt. If you are not following Michael on twitter and reading his blog, you are doing yourself and your ministry a disservice. His twitter stream is a good blend of "going out for a run, really enjoy the early morning mist" and "10 ways get email under control".
   If your ministry
   • uses blogs
   • is thinking about using blogs
   • or you are trying to explain to senior leadership that "blog" really is a word
     the above post will come in handy in setting up policies and guidelines. Thomas Nelson Publishers "get" social networking.
     Mr. Hyatt’s copyright info can be found here. Please respect his wishes.
3. This post by Jason Reynolds on supporting someone who has lost their job . There is a lot of common sense wisdom in there that is easily overlooked by well meaning people.
4. This post on the new Outlook tool. (Shameless Plug). The original post did not have this video attached, but thought I would include it here. It is cheesy and low budget to demonstrate simplicity.
5. A self-proclaimed, "unashamed, flagrantly Patriotic service highlighting the Christian roots of our country". That is what our pastor said to describe this weekend’s services at Christ Fellowship West Palm Beach. They printed out this list of quotes from our Founding Fathers in case someone tries to tell you they weren’t “Spiritual men”. Dr. Tom Mullins can “bring it” when he wants to. The kind of “bringin’ it” that would make the Rev. Billy Sunday say “that boy can BRING IT”. Services are at 6:00pm Saturday and 9:00 and 11:00 am Sunday. They are all broadcast live for you “out of towners”. Just hit the link about the right time and let your browser do the rest.
   If this guy is fired up a week ahead of time, you better fasten your seatbelts!

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!

(continue reading…)