Cause to Pause

May 25-28 is the date for the annual ACS Convention in Louisville, Ky – this year titled Ideas-to-Impact – which is a take off on a series of “ministry help” white papers they publish.
That image (and a bunch of the text) on this page have been shamelessly stolen from the ACS website.
With the exception of the above mentioned disclaimer, everything else here is the result of my personal observations.

Generally, on Tuesday there are “pre-conference” events. Last year there was a great breakout by Jason “I want what I want” Lee on using biometrics with Checkpoint, as well as Matt Irvine on launching AccessACS. These were in addition to the IT Roundtable moderated by Dean Lisenby (usually draws about 20-25 geeks from all levels) as well as a sightseeing tour. As of now, time has been set aside on Tuesday for Pre-convention classes, but they have not announced.

The big deal for Tuesday, however will be the FIRST keynote address by John Ortberg. He will be one of two keynote speakers at this year’s convention. Eric Geiger of Christ Fellowship – Miami, Fl. will be the other. I expect Monvee to be a hot topic.

Q & A
What happens at a convention anyway?
You will be surrounded by hundreds of other users, managers and support people. There will be training classes, of course, but more important than the training is the interaction that takes place outside the classrooms. I have met people whose ministry organization is similar to ours that were able to share real world examples of configuration and data resolution with me. I met people who were where I was-just they were two or three years further along in certain processes. You just cannot place a value on that. Peer to peer learning is truly the best.
It seems like there are a lot of classes. What if I run out of caffeine?
First off, there is no excuse for running out of caffeine. Ever. And yes, they do have the full gamut and then some of training available. That’s a part of what conventions are for. My recommendation is that before you go, sit in a quiet place and ask yourself “Where does our ministry really need help?” and hit those classes. They also have “tracks” available-preprogammed class groupings. So if your focus is just “People”, they have one custom designed for you.
What if I sign up for one class, but change my mind at the last minute and want to go to another one?
This year there is no pre-registration for classes required. Convention, yes. Individual classes, no.
What else?
Ok, let me just say, the training classes are always valuable. Nothing like sitting in a room with 20 other people who live it day in and day out in the real world. The instructors they use are phenomenal at keeping the class on track and not getting lost down rabbit trails. However they do this while at the same time answering questions and not sticking to a predefined plan like some sort of robot. That said, in my opinion, the classes are NOT the most important part. Here’s what you get:

• Face to face interaction with some of the support people as well as product leads and the Development Team. Nothing like being able to put a face and a name together with a voice. This is really changed the way I viewed support calls. It really helped me to see these folks interact in person. You find out they are not “playing a role and reading a script” when on the phone. They are who they are.
• Preview of upcoming products. Last year they previewed the their new remote deposit check scanner, as well as Unifyer, all-in-one kiosks and other implementation strategies.
• Seeing what is on the horizon is also helpful in making your strategy for software implementation and use. Two years ago, Facility Scheduler just didn’t do what I wanted it to. It had a lot of very cool features, just none that applied to me and the one I really needed was lacking. I had contemplated switching to a whole new system (we all know how painful that would be). By going to the convention and meeting the people in charge, I was assured that what I needed was already in the works and just waiting for some final kinks to be worked out. Having that knowledge and being able to look the person ultimately responsible for it right in the eye when they said it saved me DAYS of work and WEEKS of frustration. This year I am curious about Monvee.
• Food. Lots of it.
• If you are an information junkie, this is like waving candy corn in front of a diabetic.
• I HIGHLY recommend taking some class time and spending it in the booth area instead. Definitely connect with the guys from Implementation. It’s easy to blame the tools, however, most of the time the issue is not the tool, it is the lack of defining the goal. “For lack of a vision, the data is useless.” Nothing more embarrassing than raising a stink only to find out the real cause is PEBKAM. This will help you avoid that.

I talked to a buddy and he didn’t get much out of it when he went years ago.
You get out what you put in. Literally. Sometimes we church people are famous for our sense of entitlement. If you think you can just sit in a lobby chair and the CEO will come up and say “Gee, you look down. Is your data corrupted?” You will be disappointed. But if you see the president of the company walking in the hall and you say “Excuse me, I was wondering. Why doesn’t the company do ‘x’?” You might just get an answer. Plus all the department heads are there. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. (Sorry guys, but it is.)

Ok, I am putting this part in small type because it is kind of embarassing. They also have a karaoke party. I have always believed karaoke should be reserved for little girls under the age of 7. They can do that and look cute. The rest of us…..not so much. But I must confess, it was a complete riot. And that was without the normal ingredient that makes people think karaoke is a good idea.

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…