Ministry Centered Technologies

So we are working on finalizing the next release of PCO but before we did we wanted to get out some of the things we have been working on over the last month.

2008 Survey

Around the middle of April we opened up a survey to the owners of accounts that were created before March 1. In this survey we asked several questions like “What do you like the best about PCO?” and “What is one thing you would add to PCO?”. The results were awesome and we found out some great things about what we are doing right and what we can improve upon. You can see the answers to a couple of the survey questions on our site.

Also, I have opened up some of the other questions that will not be used for marketing here, interesting results.

Video Testimony

Jeff Spillman has been working hard over the last month getting our first Testimonial Video filmed and edited and I have to say it looks great. For our first video we decided to stay local and film Southwest Community Church and their Worship Arts Pastor Dave Moore. Go check out this great testimonial video and let us know what you think.

If you are interested in having your church interviewed for a testimonial video please e-mail Jeff Spillman (spillman@ministrycentered.com). We are looking for all types of churches: big & small, traditional & contemporary and everything in between.

Ryan Fitzgerald Blogs About PCO

We are always really excited to see new blog posts about how Planning Center Online is able to help churches minister effectively to their people. Check out this great review by Ryan Fitzgerald:

one of the best service programming resources i discovered while at catalyst was planning center. planning center brought together multiple tasks into 1 interface that everyone could access as needed.

from planning center on fitzblog.net

That is it for now. Thanks for your support & have a great May!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

I really try to keep a tabs on the blog posts that hit the street about PCO because we love seeing how churches are using it to impact their ministry. You can do that to by subscribing to the rss feed of a technorati search for “planningcenteronline.com”. Here are a couple of posts from the last week:

“As we grow as a church, our systems must grow. And I prefer to stay ahead of the growth. Planning Center Online is helping us do just that. Planning Center Online will revolutionize the way you plan your services. Its elegant, simple, and can be used by volunteers and staff. If you have ever thought to yourself “I wish there was something to help me manage all of this!!! AHHHHH!! @!#%^#*” Search no longer. Here it is!“
From the Cadillac Zak Blog

“If you’re in ministry and are over any kind of team, this site could save you a whole lot of time… it’s already done that for me. Organization isn’t always my strongest suit so this has been a great find.

If you are going to look at it, find the tutorial videos on their website and watch the overviews… that’s the quickest way to see most of the features available.”
From the Greg Adkins Blog

Happy Tax Day!!!

Tom Roepke from the “Who are these guys” website recently wrote a review on how his church uses Planning Center for their Student Ministries.

Originally when I sat down to develop Planning Center we really worked hard to make sure that this site could meet the needs of not just Worship Ministries, but all the ministries of the church. Thanks for the glowing review Tom, this really confirms that we are meeting our goals.

Planning Center (www.planningcenteronline.com) has made numerous administrative duties light. Our church was already using it to manage our multi-site campuses with four weekend services

Planning Center has lived up to its own promotional material. It allows you to develop a matrix that can track all songs used, track and notify volunteers, and give you critical control of all aspects of the service.

The biggest and most useful part of PC is that all the information regarding a service is located in one centralized place. Since it is web based it allows all users and participants quick and easy access anywhere anytime.

From the Who Are These Guys Website

This article actually hit the web a couple weeks ago but I have been a bit busy so I wasn’t able to post it until now. Pretty cool.

“PlanningCenterOnline.com has an attractive interface. The site is easy to navigate and contains clear, detailed information on the platforms features. It is great that PlanningCenterOnline.com is easily accessible from internet connection. PlanningCenterOnline.com has many great features to help organize services. The music options are truly remarkable and very important for worship. It is great that once you sign up with PlanningCenterOnline.com you always get the upgrades. The video tutorials and testimonials are a useful way to explain the application’s functions.”

Read the whole review at KillerStartUps.com

Easter is just over a week away and we decided that it would be fun to list the top 30 songs that all of our Planning Center Online users are using for Easter. I hope you find these stats as interesting as we did.

Easter 2008 Planning Center Online Song Usage Statistics Compared To Easter 2007

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I don’t know if anyone noticed but our own Aaron Stewart has been writing a featured article for WorshipLeader.com every month. Aaron has done a great job writing these articles and I hope that you enjoy them. Below I have posted links to the first three and I am going to post the rest of the articles as they are released:

January 2008 - A Master Plan For Faster Planning

As a music pastor, I’m always looking for the most efficient way to accomplish my tasks in order to be more of a minister than an administrator. I have the pleasure of serving at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas, Nevada. When I started there, I was thrilled to find that they had already made organization a high priority as evidenced by a plethora of Word and Excel documents. There were the monthly band and vocalist schedules; Big Brother, our Excel document with all past and future weekends side by side (including every song, person, video, and other elements for each week); Excel documents for each and every service order; Excel booking sheets, detailing every person and piece of equipment necessary for our tech department; plus all the other various details floating around in our heads. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

February 2008 - A Worship Plan For Vegas

Living and working in Las Vegas has many similarities to living and working as a music pastor. Being a music pastor is not a job that can easily be turned off at the end of the day; it can be the job that never sleeps. You can’t really tell your creativity what your hours are, and your volunteers don’t usually stick to your schedule either. In addition, just like the lights of Las Vegas, there is a barrage of distractions coming at you from every angle. With so many things competing for your attention, it can be difficult to remain focused. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

March 2008 - How the Matrix Changed My Life

Until about a year ago, if I thought about the Matrix, I would be envisioning the 1999 Keaunu Reeves movie in which a computer hacker learns that the world is not what he thought it was. But all that changed when Planning Center Online, our online worship planning software, added a new weapon to its arsenal: the Matrix. Not only would that word begin to conjure up a completely different image, it would also drastically simplify the way I plan my services and schedule my volunteers. Read more at WorshipLeader.com

Well, it has been a busy 2008 for us so far at Ministry Centered technologies. We were planning on getting many new features to you sometime in the first half of January, but as many of you know, the company that housed our servers had some major problems and went down. Consequently, we expedited our move to a new server facility and we have been extremely happy with our new server facility and have been able to increase both the speed and reliability of Planning Center as a result.

Now that everything is better than ever, we were able to squeeze in a couple of things that originally wouldn’t have made it into this release. There are some great new features that many of you have been requesting, and we are excited about how they will hopefully increase your productivity all the while making Planning Center easier and more fun to use. Without any further ado, here is a list of the most major and notable improvements and fixes.

People

• Add pictures to user accounts. Picture thumbnails also appear when adding people to your plan.
• New Permission: Schedule Editor.
• Schedule Editors can create, edit & email people. They can schedule people from Plans & the Matrix and can create, edit & delete block-out dates for other people. They can only delete people they have created.
• Respond Later: When responding to a scheduling request email with multiple requests, in addition to accept and decline for each request, there is now a new button, Respond Later. This allows your people to respond to some requests even if they don’t know about all of them.
• Scheduling Conflict Improvements:
• Planning Center now finds scheduling conflicts for people in rehearsal times and plan times.
• When dragging and dropping people in the Matrix, a conflict box will popup if there are plan or rehearsal time conflicts.
• When adding a group of people to a plan, or browsing people when scheduling, conflicting times are easily viewable.

Plans

• Consolidated add buttons. To clean up plan view, the add song and add header buttons now only appear when you hover over add an item.
• Unified Add Item box. There is now a single, unified box for adding items, headers & songs. This allows you to convert an item to a song and retain all the other attributes.
• New Rehearse button. The mp3 player and download PDFs buttons are now visible only when you hover over the new Rehearse button.
• Attachments you add at the bottom of your ministry on the main plans page will now appear in the Attachments box for all the plans in that ministry.
• When changing a song key or arrangement in plan view, you no longer need to refresh to see the changes.
• Shortcut keys have been simplified. You no longer need to push ctrl & alt. Just push the letter:
• I - add item
• S - add song
• H - add header
• T - add time
• P - schedule person
• N - add note
• E - email these people

Matrix

• When dragging songs in the Matrix, category notes will now copy over if you drag the song to a plan in the same ministry or another ministry that already has that category.
• When adding a song to the Matrix, Planning Center will now choose the correct song arrangement and key that you have clicked on.
• Dragging people in the Matrix now copies their assigned times and the “responses to” person if you drag them to the same category.
• Adding a song from the Matrix now sets the song length.

Songs

• Referring plans are now listed for individual song arrangements as well as the song itself.
• Chord Charts now allow font sizes of 11 & 13.
• Only administrators can delete songs they did not create. Editors can only delete a song if they created it.

Miscellaneous

• Selecting a start date in the block-out date calendar sets the end date to the same day.
• Dates for June 2008 have been corrected.
• When receiving an email from Planning Center, the name in the from field is now the first & last name of the person sending the email rather than their email address.

There were also over 61 other minor items that were addressed since our last update! We continue to be very excited about Planning Center and its future. We recently had a great vision meeting where we established a clearer picture of how Planning Center will move into the future and continue to get better and better as we grow. Thank you for believing in our ministry and letting us be a part of yours!

In Him,

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

Update: The maintenance went great, we should be prepared for a lot more growth.

Hello Everyone,

Tonight, February 1, between 9:00 and 11:00pm PST will be doing some scheduled maintenance on our database servers. During this maintenance we will need to bring down Planning Center Online. I don’t expect the outage to be more than one hour, thank you for your understanding.
Thanks!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

Before I say anything else, I’ve got good news. Planning Center is back online! Not only that, we are giving everyone 4 days free for the trouble it has caused and just to say thank you for being so patient with us. Your next credit card charge will be postponed 4 days.

In case you had not noticed, Planning Center has had some network problems over the last couple of days. First it was because the server got overloaded when everyone returned from their vacations at the same time. Then after that was fixed, AT&T went down in Palm Springs and is actually still down while I write this.

We were already in the process of upgrading our servers, but once we realized AT&T couldn’t tell us when they would be back up, we drove to our server facility, physically retrieved the servers, brought them back, and began the process of transferring the database and application to our new servers. If you want the full details of all that happened, there are a couple of posts on our blog here: http://blog.ministrycentered.com/

At around 11PM Pacific Time, the process was completed and Planning Center is back. The good news is that we have moved to some seriously upgraded servers so that this won’t happen again. Our new servers are with rackspace.com. First of all, they guarantee 100% uptime, which means this won’t happen again! For more detailed information on why they are so good, check out this page: http://www.rackspace.com/whyrackspace/network/

In addition, Planning Center should be quite a bit faster due to faster hardware in our servers. We were at a 2MB connection and our new servers have a 100MB connection. We are committed to making Planning Center as fast as possible so that you don’t have to think about it.

After we make sure the transition to the new servers is smooth and complete, we will finish up work on our next update. We’ve got some exciting new features that we are hoping to release soon.

Thank you once again for using Planning Center. We wish you many blessings in 2008.

The Planning Center Team (Jeff, Aaron & Jeff)

Wooohooo!!! We are back up…I have just switched over the DNS entries for our site to www.planningcenteronline.com to the new servers, it should only take an hour or two to propigate. If it is not working for you try staging.planningcenteronline.com.

Please e-mail us at support@ministrycentered.com for any issues that might have popped up.

Thank you so much for your prayers & support.

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies