Shameless Plug Friday 7-03-09

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!

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!

ACS Technologies: Home

This is probably going to be an “ACS week” since there are two major developments coming out of Florence.
One is their newly redesigned website, launched last night. It is built and hosted on their “Extend Platform” CMS and it looks to me like they fashioned it in a “multi-site church” sort of way.
Instead of multiple campuses and then multiple ministries, they divided the product lines into Mega(Enterprise), Medium/Large(Foundational), Small(Membership Plus), etc. and under each one of those are the different product lines as applicable. By playing with the URL a bit, especially between the Mega and Med/Large you can see how this pans out. Also helps a lot with the navigation.

They did a nice job of taking the focus off the company and putting it on the user. Do our church websites do that? Is the focus on us as a church or is the focus on the person in front of the screen?

Disclaimer: For those who think I say “all nice things all the time” about ACS, Dad said “If you have something good to say about someone, tell others. If you have something bad to say, deal with just that person or shut up.” Dad was a man of brevity. I don’t always live up to Dad’s words, but I do try.

This is the minor announcement. The major one? Stay tuned..

ACS Technologies: Home