Cause to Pause

Recently David Sterrett of First Pres. Austin, and I have begun talking about our uses and potential uses of AccessACS. What started out as “Are you taking payments for VBS online?” turned into a “We should set up a collaboration tool so we can have an ongoing dialog about this.”
In the course of our discussions, the topic came up:

Should we invite ACS Technologies to the discussion now or wait until we are further along?

The concern was that by having them participate in the initial stages of the dialog, it might hamper some of the openness and candor we were looking for.
A quick gut check settled that question as a non-issue based on prior performance. They are known for thick skin when it comes to listening to their clients.
But it brought up another question or two:

Are all your vendors like that? When you come with a problem, do they respond or just kind of “duck, hoping you will go away”?

I used to deal with an office equipment supplier like that. When my main color MFC would act up, they kind of “ducked”. Operative words are “used to deal with”.

But more importantly, are we like this with the people we serve? Do we “duck and hope they go away”? I am not just talking about the folks who are high maintenance – but those who legitimately have needs and gripes that we should attend to. If we can’t correct it the situation, to at least offer an EXPLANATION not an EXCUSE as to why and what can be done. If someone is upset, do you want to hear it from them when you can do something about it, or from the grapevine?

I am willing to bet, the more we want to duck, the better the odds are we should take that one on the chin.

If you are user of ACS’ Facility Scheduler and AccessACS, you get a handy little calendar link that lets you publish calendars to your website. (You can also Broadcast your published events live to digital signage. More on that from Jason Lee here.)

The only problem is, if someone is on your website and they click your calendar link, they see this in calendar form, or or this in table form. Click and event, go ahead. Boring. Now, granted, if you go to any Monday and hit L.I.F.E. Ministries you can see what happens when you drop a little HTML in the event description (note to self: get that task caught up for other events). Still, the calendar display itself is kind of boring.

The obvious easy fix is to drop that into an iframe. Our calendar page now looks like this. Thanks to my buddy Matt Irvine for allowing me to rip this idea off. (don’t mind the gray, colors are totally customiizable).
 Also, if you have multiple calendars like we do, and for some reason want to combine them for display on some pages, but not others, you can edit the links provided through AccessACS. Suppose you want a calendar that displays Youth and Children Events, but not Adult. Tweak the link. You’d be surprised what you can do with “&amp”

Next stop: Displaying events based on “next seven days” or “next 30 days” instead of the current month starting on the first.

A few months back I wrote this post on the ACS/Outlook plugin that pulls your member data and calendar events into Outlook. There’s also this video on how an event goes from inception in AccessACS to someone’s Outlook calendar and phone.

If you were wondering if the plugin works with Outlook 2010 (beta), the answer is “yes”. (I know, it’s just a series of API calls, it should continue to work.) The only hitch in the git-a-long so far is Outlook does not seem to maintain login id creds. when you close it. Next time you open Outlook, you will need to enter your username and password into the add-in section.

Too bad Google‘s calendar synch returns the “only works with Outlook 2003 or 2007″ error.  Totally kills the last step in the process for me…