Archive for June, 2007

Saddleback Worship Conference is a wrap!

June 29, 2007 at 4:43 pm · Filed under General, Planning Center

Rick Muchow at our booth at the Saddleback Worship Conference

Wow! What an exciting week! It was awesome to meet so many of our customers. Rick Muchow (right) from Saddleback (if you didn’t know) was able to come by our booth and wish us happy birthday after he had a quick training session with Aaron (middle) where he planned out five of his upcoming worship services in minutes. Ok…back to work on the next version of Planning Center, we have some pretty cool things planned!

Thanks!

Jeff Berg (left)
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

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Happy Birthday Planning Center!!!

June 27, 2007 at 4:41 pm · Filed under General, Planning Center

Planning Center Online is now 1 year old!!! Woohoo! To celebrate, tomorrow (Thursday), we will be having cupcakes at our booth at the Saddleback Worship Conference. Offer valid while supplies last, void where prohibited. Come by and celebrate with us!

Jeff

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Wow…a blog storm…

June 26, 2007 at 8:19 am · Filed under General, Planning Center

Well I was very happy to see Planning Center Online mentioned in several blogs this morning. Check them out:

Church 2.0 – the blog

I’m not sure how to succinctly summarize this tool’s features except to say that it does everything you’d hope that it would (sequence songs, and other elements of the service) as well as store mp3’s, lyrics and other relevant attachments (paid version), schedule and email personnel according to their roles, track and report song usage, import song data from CCLI, and transpose chord charts (also on the paid version) – all on an online interface you can share with everyone involved in the planning and implementation of your church’s worship services.

Jason Powell – Church IT and other musings

After watching the demo/walk-through of Planning Center, there’s no way we can make Sharepoint do the same things with such simplicity and elegance … without dropping a TON of resources on custom development and even then you don’t get that AJAX look and feel. I’m confident we could make something useful for our arts guys using Sharepoint, but who knows when we’ll actually make that happen.

Ramblings of a Tech Guy

I am part of the Worship Planning team at Harmony Hill. As many of you know, this can be an extremely daunting task. Well check out this tool: Planning Center Online. This really looks like it will help a ton! I cant wait to dig into it more when I have a chance. Check it out when you get a chance.

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Safari 3 BETA & IE 6

June 15, 2007 at 12:20 pm · Filed under General, Planning Center

Hello Everyone,

Apple released a BETA version of Safari 3 this week and we have found that it has some bugs that show up when you are try to upload files to Planning Center Online. So if you have decided to upgrade to this BETA release of Safari we recommend you either downgrade back to Safari 2 or use FireFox to work with Planning Center Online until the final version of Safari 3 comes out in October.

Also, with the update we published last week we introduced some bugs in the Matrix for those of you using Internet Explorer 6. I am working on fixing these issues and will update the site as soon as I have them completed, in the mean time we suggest that you upgrade to Internet Explore 7 by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/ie7.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to shoot us an e-mail or call us at (888) 777-2821.

Thanks!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

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[Planning Center Update] One Year Of Planning

June 12, 2007 at 9:48 am · Filed under General

I can’t believe it has already been one year since we launched Planning Center Online. One year ago this week we let Planning Center Online out into the wild, right before our first advertising push at the Purpose Driven Worship Conference & Festival. We had a great time meeting many of our first customers and getting feedback right away on the product and the excitement people had about it.

One of the features that everyone loved was the Matrix which was awesome since I just finished programming that feature less than a month before the conference. Now it feels appropriate that a couple of weeks before this conference (now known as the Saddleback Worship Conference & Festival) that I was able to release a totally new version of the Matrix along with some other great features.

Matrix

  • Select plans from any ministry in your account, for example you can now see your contemporary service right next to your traditional service.
  • Every section is collapsible which allows you to clean up your display without having to refresh the screen
  • You can now edit Plan Notes & the descriptions of common plan items by just clicking the box
  • Fixes drag and drop issues in Safari

Songs

  • You can now see which songs have MP3s, PDFs or DOCs right from the song list.
  • Chord Charts now support alternate chords (aka capos)
  • Added an activity report to show you how many times a song was used, downloaded & streamed over a period of time
  • When adding a song to a plan it will show you when it was last used

My Calendar

  • Added iCalendar support for syncing your Planning Center Calendar to Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Apple iCalendar

People

  • You can export all or a selection of your people to a csv document
  • You can now sort your people by their permission
  • Clicking on an e-mail address from within Planning Center will allow you to send an e-mail to one person right from Planning Center

Miscellaneous

  • Australians now see dates as they like them, dd/mm/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yyyy. We are going global. ;-)
  • You can now collapse custom properties that you don’t use
  • You can now set your calendar to start on a Monday instead of a Sunday
  • Changed the accept & decline button colors to help people differentiate between the two
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes & interface clean-up

I want to thank all of you for continually helping Planning Center be the best worship planning software! I am so excited to see what this next year will bring.

Thanks,

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

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We will be there!

June 7, 2007 at 8:22 am · Filed under General

Saddleback Worship Conference Banner

We launched Planning Center Online 1 year ago at this conference and we are so excited to be going back. I am going to try to get a Birthday cake (I don’t know if there are any health code issues) or something at our booth. So come by and see us, we love to meet our customers!

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Thank You Apple

June 5, 2007 at 2:11 pm · Filed under General

Over a year ago I purchased a MacBook so that I could test Planning Center Online on the Mac Versions of FireFox & Safari. Right after I got situated on my new toy Apple through out a new version that was 40% faster than the one I just purchased. That was a sad day for me.

Well, almost overnight my MacBook has became my primary development machine and now I am finding that I needed some more power so I decided to purchase a new MacBook Pro. But instead of purchasing one and having a new version come out I decided to wait because I knew that they hadn’t updated the MacBook Pro in a while and they were going to do it soon. Today was that day!

I wish I had an Apple store close to me, but I don’t so I will have to wait for them to deliver it to me this week or next. Wooohooo!!! I can’t wait.
Jeff

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